The Denver Botanic Gardens has a message for its youngest visitors: Get off the path and go explore.
Botanic gardens worldwide are re-evaluating their role in bringing children and nature back together. The problem is serious: Thanks to over-scheduled free time and stranger-danger concerns, today’s kids play less outside than any other generation past, says Richard Louv, bestselling author of “Last Child in the Woods.”
The Denver Botanic Gardens is doing its part to counter that with its new $4 million, 3-acre Mordecai Children’s Garden, opening Monday.
Surprisingly, even in a state with as many natural resources as Colorado, kids can still be disconnected from nature. “You wouldn’t believe how many kids haven’t been to the mountains,” says Botanic Gardens CEO Brian Vogt.
That “nature deficit” contributes to childhood problems such as obesity, attention disorders and even depression. But the negative effects go far beyond childhood: Where will the next generation of environmentalists come from if today’s kids are stuck inside?
When kids participated in wild nature activities such as camping, playing in the woods, hiking, walking and fishing before age 11, the experience was more likely to stay with them in a powerful way, a 2006 Cornell University study showed.
Grassy soccer fields don’t count. Today’s kids already have so many structured experiences, from organized sports to music lessons. What they need is more free play to build independence and stretch imaginations. They need to experience wonder: “It’s that moment when you were 3 or 4 and found a rock and turned it over and found you were not alone in the universe,” Louv said.
Yet, letting kids loose in nature is turning into a topic of parental debate. In one camp are “helicopter” parents nervous to let their children to play unsupervised outdoors. On the other side are idealists wanting to recreate the good old days when we ran free in nearby woods and vacant lots until streetlights came on.
Free play doesn’t always need to be unsupervised — but it does need to be unstructured. The new children’s garden provides a much-needed middle ground by offering a safe place for kids to get off the path.
“We wanted to create alternatives to give kids that opportunity to find something fun and mysterious,” says Vogt. A red rock amphitheater with petroglyphs, for example, is not immediately spotted. You have to come around the corner to see it, and it becomes a secret place for kids to play.
The San Diego Botanic Gardens opened a redesigned children’s garden in 2009. Overall attendance rose 40 percent in six months.
Denver’s new children’s garden aims to inspire kids (and parents) to seek out real life experiences by mimicking Colorado’s diverse ecosystems, from alpine meadows and mountain ranges to a timber forest, wetlands and waving grasslands. From there, parents need to clear schedules and sponsor explorations of their own.
Loose materials for imaginary games are abundant: Scattered pine cones, rock towers topped with pebbles begging to be rearranged and branches for spontaneous fort building.
Like a green Alice in Wonderland, the garden invites interaction at every turn. A sign proclaiming “Touch Me” stands next to a soft, flat-needled white fir — and a prickly blue spruce. A sign commanding “Smell Me” draws attention to fragrant horehound mint.
For a new generation of children, the point is having a chance to reconnect with nature in a lasting way — and a chance to experience wonder.
Lisa Wirthman has covered business, politics and travel for publications such as USA Today, U.S. News & World Report and Investor’s Business Daily. She lives in Highlands Ranch.
