How to create a child-friendly garden

Later this month, amidst the transportive gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, there will be an altogether different proposition – a garden designed by children, for children. Created by students from Sulivan Primary School in London’s Parsons Green, who have worked alongside garden designer Harry Holding, the No Adults Allowed garden is a glimpse of what child-led design can be. “A dream children’s garden is one that enlivens the senses and captures the imagination,” says Holding. “They are blessed with vivid imaginations and a garden should allow for opportunities where they can create imagined worlds.” For the children tasked with designing this garden, that has meant a shady woodland, flower-filled mini-meadows and a wetland with oversized bog plants – set around a handbuilt den. Among some of their more outlandish wants? Ghoulish carnivorous plants.

For Holding, creating a child-centric garden is straightforward: a space for a hideout, trees to climb, water, bug hotels and multilayered sensory planting that will all help to bring in wildlife. “There’s nothing more tactile and awe-inspiring than minimally processed raw materials such as stone, timber and water,” he says of his aim to foster a deep love of gardening from a young age. 

The garden highlights a pressing modern dilemma as the battle between screen time and green time intensifies. Immersion in nature feels more crucial than ever given the increase in mental-health issues in children, including anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other psychological problems. Earlier this year, NHS data revealed an alarming 53 per cent spike in emergency mental-health referrals in children. Being in green spaces releases serotonin and reduces cortisol, abetting a feeling of wellbeing and elevating mood.

Encouraging children into nature – and involving them in gardens – is a key facet of the vision at the Royal Horticultural Society. Last year at Chelsea, Holding cut his teeth with an immersive, foraging garden for School Food Matters. Like many of the show’s community-focused designs, it was funded by Project Giving Back (between 2022 and 2026 the charity will fund 60 gardens) and relocated to two schools: the Alec Reed Academy Primary School in Ealing and The Beacon CE Primary School in Liverpool. At the same show, Tom Massey previewed his playful, insect-focused garden for The Royal Entomological Society Garden, with its colourful domed “lab”. The garden is opening this summer in Stratford Cross as the focal point for the charity’s new education programme for schools, which aims to ignite an interest in insects.

The trend has garnered royal approval, mostly notably from the Princess of Wales, who collaborated with landscape architects Andrée Davies and Adam White on the RHS Back to Nature Garden in 2019, where children could explore a woodland filled with deadwood, rope swings, a paddling stream and a giant elevated “nest”. The idea of creative and natural play spaces was central to the ethos of the garden – an astounding 90 per cent of our adult brains are developed before the age of five.

A giant timber nest and woodland may feel a little regal for the regular urban back garden, but the principles can translate. Space permitting, planting a small grove of woodland trees (birch casts beautiful dappled shade) can be a quick and cheap way to create a similar play zone. Beneath them, mini stumperies (made from unwanted tree roots and logs) or ferneries will conjure a wild Jurassic playground. A makeshift den can be knocked together with hazel poles or sticks. Or, if you want to invest in something beautiful and bespoke, Judith Needham’s woven willow onion-shaped den (£725, judithneedham.co.uk) or the smaller Podkin (£550) can be used indoor and out.

For some designers a lawn is an important element of an adaptable scheme. “A child-friendly garden doesn’t need to look designed for children,” says garden designer Alasdair Cameron. “But they want to be able to play games and often that’s on grass. They also love something as simple as a path snaking through and being able to run around different areas.” In his own Devon garden, transformed from a farm and surrounding pasture, a series of bucolic garden spaces with lawns overlooked by topiary has been a hit with his three children. “When the topiary was first planted they used to love jumping over it, and as it got bigger it was great for hiding behind. They used to play this game called Around the World around it.”

As the garden is increasingly viewed as an additional “living space”, designers are finding that clients come to them with a checklist of features they want to incorporate. According to garden designer Pollyanna Wilkinson, that nearly always includes a trampoline. She sinks them into the ground so they become less of a glaring focal point. She has also immersed them in a concealed zone in the garden with a living willow wall so that they are discovered rather than presented as the prime view.

“Water features are inviting for play too,” she says, advising using troughs or basins set at child height to ensure they are accessible. But she warns not to go too far. “One of the biggest mistakes I see with clients is designing the garden around the children because it’s a bit short-termist.” Instead, she says, think about how a space can evolve: a woodland area with logs to perch on and play with can later evolve into a seating area with chairs and a fire pit for teens.

Arguably the most radical – and future-proof ideas – come from California (where droughts are long and persistent, and lawns that would need irrigation are ethically out of the question). Here, landscape architect David Godshall of Terremoto studio gets creative when clients are keen to incorporate play structures in their gardens. For journalist Andrew Romano and his family, he created a deconstructed frame-fort on the steep slope beneath their modernist 1936 house in Los Angeles. Hanging ropes, balance beams, platforms, rope scramble nets, log walkways and a slide form a Jenga-style construction amongst trees and ferns, grasses and tactile shrubs.

In many of their projects, however, Godshall and his team dispense with structure altogether. “There’s a pedagogical school of thought called Loose Parts, which asserts children should be given wood, stones, sticks and so on, so they have the ability to make their own toys, structures or creations,” he explains. His projects often feature sinuous paths winding through tactile plants, raised beds or planters (the perfect height for children to play at), boulders, and logs laid out as stepping stones with driftwood, dipping pools and baths. His plant palette is typically Californian (and often native), and leans towards super-sized specimens (including giant cacti, prickly pear, yucca and agave) that create an otherworldly, jungle-like environment. But soft and fragrant plants are equally important. Outside their home studio, they’ve planted Artemisia californica (California sagebrush), Tagetes lemmonii (mountain marigold), Lepechinia fragrans (fragrant pitcher sage) and Salvia apiana (white sage). “My eight-year old son Wolfgang is a birder and hangs out by our Atriplex lentiformis [saltbush],” Godshall says. “He knows that over the course of a day, thousands of birds will move through it. He enjoys identifying them.” 

But less is generally more. “If you build a wild, living garden that attracts wildlife, build in lots of nooks and crannies to explore and have a water source they can control,” he says in conclusion, “a child will make their own way in a garden.”