Product Description

This gorgeous, full-color exploration of the family garden--stuffed with resourceful ideas and easy--to-complete projects--shows how to create thriving gardens that serve both the child's need for creative play and the adult's yearning for beauty and serenity. 100 full-color photos 7-city author tour. .

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #879766 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Amazon.com Review
A Child's Garden is an excellent guide for parents wishing to create natural spaces in the garden where their children can openly play and explore. Stepping beyond the traditional ideas of building a treehouse or planting a vegetable garden, the authors include 60 unique ways to tailor a landscape to nurture a child's sense of enchantment and wonder. For instance, many children like to hide, and the book includes ideas for building natural caves out of woven willow branches, climbing vines, or weeping shrubs. For parents wanting to plant a good tree for climbing, this guide knowledgeably recommends the fast-growing and sturdy Norway maple as one of the best. It's filled with such information throughout its nine sections on water, creatures, refuges, dirt, heights, movement, make-believe, nurturing, and learning. Messages on safety are wisely included, along with an excellent list of resources covering everything from buying butterfly houses to visiting selected children's gardens. Through its many color photographs and warm, wise text, A Child's Garden will draw parents into their children's timeless, carefree world and perhaps back to a time when they themselves explored streams, played in the sand, studied bugs, and roamed without agenda. --Karen Karleski

Review
"[Dannenmaier] presents 60 vibrant and inspired landscape plans and innovative weekend projects designed to help motivated parents create imaginary havens that will appeal to both young ones and those who are young at heart." Carol Haggas, Booklist (Booklist )

"[Dannenmaier] presents 60 vibrant and inspired landscape plans and innovative weekend projects designed to help motivated parents create imaginary havens that will appeal to both young ones and those who are young at heart." Carol Haggas, Booklist (Booklist )

"[Dannenmaier believes that a garden made for children will engage adults too, because it will be full of secret hideaways and sensory delights."
—House and Garden (House and Garden )

[Dannenmaier believes that a garden made for children will engage adults too, because it will be full of secret hideaways and sensory delights. House and Garden (House and Garden )

Review

“By delving into ‘how children really play,’ the book shares stories of families who have transformed time in the garden into playtime, and features the blueprints, photos, and plants that made each garden successful."

(Flower )

“This beautiful and informal book asks the questions: How can the healthy development of children be served by a garden—the term garden here referring to any natural outdoor space set aside for recreation, not only a place for growing flowers and vegetables.”

(Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education )

"The book is packed with luscious photographs and simple techniques and structures you can use to nurture a child’s wild side.”

(Hobby Farm Home )

“Each topic includes ideas for creating such environments as treehouses and secret passages. Also offered is a list of resources that features landscape designers, organizations, places with public children's gardens, and garden books for both youngsters and adults.”

(Phoenix Home and Garden )

“It’s teaming with inspiration…”

Metro Parent Magazine (Metro Parent Magazine )

"Informed, useful. Splendid."

(Dallas Morning News )

"Dannenmaier … reminds parents to plan both for open space and hiding places, leaving plenty of room for young imaginations to grow." (South Florida Sun-Sentinel )

---

Customer Reviews

A wonderful book for parents and gardeners
This book is exactly what I was searching for. I love to garden, but I also need to accommodate my two rambunctious children and a variety of pets. This book has page after page of creative ideas, safety considerations, examples, and plenty of photos. The author is clear, interesting, and very informative about both gardening and childhood development.

A delightful way for parents to connect with their children
This beautifully illustrated book looks at gardens with the delight of a child from the perspective of a mother who loves her children and her community. Ms. Dannenmaier shows us how to get more out of the natural world, no matter our age or environment. She shows parents how to connect with their children in the garden, particularly urban spaces. This is a great gift book.

Enchantingly possible!
Every page of this book has full color photos from some of the most incredible gardens for children I have ever seen, from the large elaborate planned spaces of botanical gardens, to small modest spaces that will fit any space or budget. While this is not a heavy-duty "how to" book, it is a book of ideas--and we all know that ideas lead to other ideas! The cover of this book alone is inspiring!

The author asks, "How important are the old childhood pleasures of collecting seed pods, fishing in ditches, making bowers, picking flowers, and climbing trees?...long hours of unstructured outdoor exploration are a fast-vanishing aspect of contemporary childhood." She continues, "...the environment [on her uncle's farm] was so complex--full of smells, varied land forms, and mesmerizing creatures. I remember a scooped out pond surrounded by mud in which pigs, geese and ducks joyously wallowed. The strange pungency of the air, the frighteningly gigantic hogs, the mysterious, billowy grasses...still fill my senses." The author talks at great length about the psychology of nature, and of German educational reforms of the early 20th century (but only the good ones ). Each page has a line fron a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, for "...you may see, if you will look Through the windows of this book, Another child far away, And in another garden play."

The book includes suggestions for water gardens, sensory gardens, vegetable gardens, themed gardens, natural sand boxes, mazes, and attracting wildlife, plus many resources for strange seeds, odd plants, and landscape designers in varied areas of the US and the UK, all geared towards making a child's space a natural one.

BTW, when I bought the book, my kids grabbed it from me immediately. They love to look at the gardens and plan ours. Oh, and there are two black and whilte photos in the book: One is of children during WWI, tending a large city garden; the other is a 1940's style playground, with the steel and concrete structures that many of us recall from childhood. My 4yo playground-lover looked at both, and declared that he'd rather explore the garden.