Landscaping For New Families

As the product of rural/suburban homeschooling in the ‘90s, I consider myself to be lucky.  I was given the opportunity to explore and moderately alter both natural and landscaped areas, as well as construction sites, abandoned properties, cliffsides, orchards, and rock outcroppings with moderate and trusting oversight. Since then, more land has been claimed, subdivided, and paved; parental oversight has strengthened; and the universe outside of screen-devices is less trodden.  As open land is privatized, subdivided, and built up, and as financial constraints push us parents to work longer hours, our yards (if we have them) are increasingly important in the bids we make for our children to explore outdoors.

The challenge of making a yard inviting (or dare I say inspiring) enough to draw your children outdoors when faced with television, video games, minecraft…. (and all the other addicting flashing lights our children are needing to learn to cope with and eventually self-moderate) seems almost impossible.  As a landscaper, a parent, and a child at heart I would like to share some of the elements that come to mind when designing the outdoors to match this epic feat

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For a child, a yard should walk the line between welcoming and challenging. A broad lawn is welcoming, but so boring on its own. An overgrown area, by contrast, even strikes fear into the hearts of adults.  Both spaces will be largely neglected without other elements. There must be elements of mystery, difficulty, and purpose, to call a child to connect with the landscape, as well as space, safety, and parental connection so the child can visualize themselves there.  It's hard to enter places when you can't imagine yourself there, and imagination won't take over without its spark.

Elements to Spark the Imagination

terraforming 

With appropriate boundaries, you can allow your child to be in the driver’s seat. Create an area (or areas) where the child is able to dig, move sticks and stones, make shelters, mud pies, bottomless pits, castles and kingdoms, buried treasure (don't forget to make a map!) and obstacle courses. At some point you may feel like you have invited very large bipedal wood rats, gophers, or beavers to live in your yard and garden, but this is a good thing. The more comfortable they get now with altering the environment and observing the results, the more beautiful a garden renovation they'll be able to make for you when they are teenagers, and besides, their creative zone is likely where they will choose to plant the Arbor Day bare-root conifer sapling they will hopefully be awarded yearly throughout grade school.

Balance and climbing

Consider bringing in or making use of existing large stones, logs, and trees for your child’s obstacle courses. A well tied rope on a secure branch, a slackline or hammock between trees, or a rope ladder to reach the next-to-lowest substantial branches can be game changers for hours of fun. 

Agriculture and passive foraging

Find a nice sunny place, preferably close to your kitchen door(making it easy to hop out for ingredients when cooking, or to gather a quick salad) to set aside for a vegetable and herb garden. While you may start out attempting to grow a standard crop, herbs may be the real winners. They are harder to kill and fun to munch in passing. Oregano, mint, lemon balm, dill, fennel, and chives make a good start. Of those listed, the savory herbs should be in your arsenal against the myriad colds children bring home, and the sweet ones have calming properties in tea before bed (consider lemon balm to be good for both). Garden sorrel tends to be a favorite among children and makes a normal salad lemony.

If you want useful plants that are easy to grow, and take a beating, consider getting to know the volunteer weeds that pop up. You will find that most of them are safe and nutritious for eating. With a little collaboration, children are quick studies in identification. The knowledge of what to casually eat outdoors will stick with them and is likely to prove useful whether a dystopian or utopian future is left for them. Whether you have a prize-winning cauliflower or weed patch, the central point is that you are engaging with the space and learning about it together.  

Let the surrounding ecosystem spill into your lawn.

If your lawn butts up to a fence, and that fence butts up to a forest, or if you can see a forest off in the hazy distance, or if you know there has been a forest where you stand within the last 50-500 years, plant a few conifers (out from the house if you can), plant sword ferns, salal, Oregon grape, and anything in the huckleberry/ blueberry family. smother mulch with cardboard around the planting and top with bark. If you're up for it, wrestle a chunk of fallen wood into the area and some big rocks. Not only will the aesthetic severity of your yard wither, but your children will feel way more at-home on excursions to the forest.

Bioregions

Inviting in your surrounding bioregion is a great start, but why stop there? Educational opportunities abound when you start to simulate different bioregions not to mention you save money when globetrotting from home! Laying sand in a sunny spot with good drainage, some surface rocks, and dry area plants can make an easy dessert. Large vertical stones fit together with silt and high carbon mix interplanted with heather, dwarf conifers, kinnikinnick, alpine huckleberries, strawberries, mosses, (or any mixture of alpine-ish plants that is easy for you) can make a pretty nifty alpine area. An indent in the land, lined by clay soil or a pond liner, (or a buried wading pool if you're on a budget and have just enough time to throw together what you already have) kept moist and filled with cattails, sticks of shrub dogwood (which generally root themselves), and any other easy marshy plant will make a quick little wetland.  

Wildlife

Put in a tree, you will get birds. If the tree has nuts, squirrels are not far behind. Biological life and animal life are good friends. When you are contributing to a healthy ecosystem, you and your family will have plenty of little friends to observe, imitate, and research.

Occasional creeks

How the ground holds water and how the water flows through a property. We all remember turning the hose on and changing the flow of a momentary creek as pine needles and small sticks drift down it. Whether it fills from the end of a hose or as a vernal stream feature in your property's groundwater movement plan, an area for water to move is very engaging.

Entertaining 

The pandemic blessed our family with two small additions. Overjoyed and overwhelmed as we were, we soon noticed our social life had tanked. In designing the outdoor space, remember to add a comfortable area that can fit lawn chairs for you and a few friends, a fire pit or chiminea, and a little area for running and cartwheels. Lawn, cobblestone, or bark chips (starting a few feet from the chiminea) are great options for this area. I advise lining the area, on any edge with decent sun exposure, with fruit bearing plants. Grapes and raspberries, even espalier fruit trees and the smaller kiwis, to some extent, can compactly follow fence lines and you can choose something to ripen at any point through the warmer seasons. Your friends will associate visits with both the sweetness of your company and fructose. 

Decomposition

On the opposite end of the property from where you like to entertain, and as far from the house as possible, there may be a space where you and your children can study decomposition. In a society terrified of death we rarely get a chance to make peace with this life bringing biological reality. Compost bins are standard, useful, and pretty easy to operate. If that only whets your family’s appetite for decomposition, consider bringing home something dead from the side of the road, putting it in a plastic salad box with holes poked in it, and placing it under a pile of soil or leaves. Soon you and your children will have an awesome skeleton to observe that is not much different from your own! Use guides online along with gloves, old toothbrushes, and hydrogen peroxide to get them clean and ready for the science fair.

Accept change and imperfection

Many people think they want a landscape that is rigid and fixed. They spend lots of money, lots of plastic and chemicals, and plenty of cortisol trying to keep something fluid from deviating. Children and nature are a lot alike, and are very well met. With either, you can put the bones in place and offer gentle direction along the way, but like parenting, the best aesthetic choices in a landscape come from getting to know the property. A thriving property may have a few weeds and last year's fort, but if you engage with it, it will have meaning and feel deeply like home. The neighbors can wonder about your yard and your unique children all they want. Invite them over to enjoy a bottony lesson by your little ones.

Your hand, and dirty knees.

The number one thing that will spark a child’s creativity and drive to be outdoors is you. Whether it's through imitating your behavior or in having a hand to hold the first few times your child engages in an activity, you are the link. Therefore, having activities and an environment that engages your interest becomes paramount. Take a moment to look over this article again. Make a list of five points that look the most fun to you, and let that shape your direction. Together you will be making life changes that both enrich your family’s time here on Earth, and enrich the Earth through your time well spent.