by Sally Treadwell

She’s so grounded…
He’s really down to earth…

We know instinctively, it would seem, that it’s good to be in touch with the earth. And after all, when was the last time you saw a Type A, frenetic, stressed-out gardener?

But gardening’s about more than just balance. Gardening is—or should be—a slow pleasure, a heady delight, the creation of a fabulous place where your family can live, relax, learn, play, giggle and entertain. And cure what ails you, too—think Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel, The Secret Garden.

This spring, put your family back in touch with the rhythm of the earth. If you have a yard, we have ideas for enjoying it more. If you don’t, despair not. A lush planter on your balcony can attract hummingbirds and add freshness and color; you can grow vegetables in surprising places. You might search out a community garden that will give you a space to grow what you will, or ask an elderly neighbor if you can take over their garden chores and split the veggies or cut flowers.

Why Gardening?
Let’s see. For a start, it burns up 324 (planting seedlings) to 688 (double-digging) calories per hour, and if you delay putting on the sunscreen for ten to twenty minutes you’ll also get some of the essential ‘sunshine’ vitamin D that doctors are now finding to be in dangerously short supply for so many people, including teens.

Your kids will see natural science in action instead of in a museum or textbook—wow, why are there so many worms, and how do flowers grow, and what’s that bee doing? (Slip in a conversation about the importance of bees to our harvests and why colony collapse is a serious concern.)

If you grow vegetables, even just a window-box of tomatoes and basil or lettuce, your children will be more intrigued and willing to try healthy foods. Eating fresh is so much nicer when you can snip lettuce from a self-watering planter, spice up soup with some bold cilantro, or dig up forgiving potatoes periodically so your kids can exclaim over how much they’re growing. And I’ve never quite got over my astonishment that easy-to-grow radishes are incredibly good in pasta sauce, of all things.

Gardening is a real-world antidote to instant pay-off video games. It teaches kids about the value of work (you have to dig, ensure drainage and add compost before you chow down on those sweet grape tomatoes), patience (it’ll be several months before those bulbs miraculously perfume the air) and dreaming, too (every gardener is dreamer, envisioning the secrets hidden in hard little seeds and bulbs).

If your family plans and creates a yard you’ll enjoy together, you’ll strengthen bonds. Those important conversations will happen quite effortlessly as you weed or dig side by side.

You’ll definitely de-stress. Horticultural therapy—a.k.a. getting out in the fresh air and digging—has become a well-known and effective means of treating everything for ADHD to depression.

Oh, and you’ll also increase the value of your home when you turn your yard into a gorgeous living space. Come to think of it, why WOULDN”T you make a beeline (groan) for the yard?

Jack, Jill, and the Bean House
There’s no sweeter sound than the stifled giggles and happy crunching of vegetables you’ll hear when you splice two fairy tales; Jack’s magical beanstalk and the incredible, edible gingerbread house. Once the initial set-up was done, our bean house was easy to tend, huge fun, and truly lovely to look at.

First, find your site. Be creative—we actually lifted the turf from a u-shaped section of our back lawn and dug in some compost and drainage material; in the fall we replaced the turf with no problem. Next, build a temporary structure to support bean or sugar snap pea plants. This can be as simple as bamboo stakes lashed together at the top to make a teepee or you can build a more elaborate tent or house-shaped frame from natural wood—nail together leggy rhododendron limbs or pieces of locust, if possible using a natural fork as a “roof beam” support. Or weave a lattice of willow branches; or tie bamboo stakes from the garden center together. (Caution: do NOT use arsenic-laced pressure-treated lumber.) You may also need to run garden twine strings from top to bottom.

Then plant the twining vegetable of your choice. Fresh-picked beans are wonderful, or you might go for irresistible sugar-snap peas that are at their best straight off the plant, totally raw. Cover the beds with hay or mulch to inhibit weed growth and protect roots. As soon as the young plants start to wave tendrils, help them to find their strings and supports; they’ll quickly cover the house with lacy shade. Poke some sunflower and cosmos seeds around the outside of the structure to make your bean house even more vividly entrancing.

Universal Gardening
Wheelchairs, bad backs and achy knees should be no barrier to the sheer joy of scrabbling around in the dirt and producing something beautiful and/or edible. As any decent accessibility expert will tell you, when people are physically unable to do things they love, depression and stress levels rise while the ability to heal becomes impaired.
• Raised beds or planters plus a smooth deck or path make gardening possible for the wheelchair-bound. Family members might have to help prepare the soil.
• Tools with padded handles and grips are easier on arthritic hands and fingers.
• Kneeler seats make it way easier to stand up when you’re done gardening, and are handy for little rests—they’re a great investment since they’re also very useful in the house. A sturdy but lightweight hopper cart can also work for seating, and is an excellent way to carry everything you’ll need.
• Divide heavy loads of dirt or mulch, and/or put them into a cart or wheelbarrow to save back strain.
• Change positions frequently. Soak your tired muscles in a warm bath afterwards.

Tools for Kids
Parents are spoiled for choice these days when they go to buy kids’ gardening equipment—ladybug Wellies, frog-handled shovels, teeny wheelbarrows. But remember, unless you have toddlers, kids need real tools that are sized just for them. A plastic shovel is great for sand but most children are capable of doing good work in the garden, and if you can set aside a corner just for them, you will be doing them a great service. Teach them to look after their tools, collecting them up at the end of the day. They should clean them off and then stick them in a bucket of sand mixed with a little linseed oil.

Theme Gardens
No, we’re not looking for Disneyworld in your back yard, but working to a theme can make gardening into a true joy. A few ideas to consider:

A Shakepeare garden. Combine literature with sunshine in honor of the Bard, an avid gardener. Enliven your kids’ inevitable exploration of his work by searching out his numerous mentions of plants and using them in your yard. Rosemary, of course, (“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance: pray you, love, remember,” and tiny Johnny-jump-ups, also called love-in-idleness, “and there is pansies, that's for thoughts." Or “Smile heaven upon this fair conjunction,” indeed, when, as in Richard III, you “unite the white rose and the red.”

Titania’s bower is tricky—“where the wild thyme blows/ Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows/ Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine/ With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine…” OK, thyme’s easy, and woodbine is honeysuckle, so you can drape a rustic arbor with that, and eglantine is the briar rose. But how the heck are you going to find a cowslip (oxlip) in the US? Cheat a little with some primroses—but not the vividly-colored ones that proliferate these days; you’ll have to seek out the more delicate creamy yellow ones.

If a dratted dandelion or two should slip in, never fear. Just quote Cymbeline—“Golden lads and girls all must/ As chimney-sweepers come to dust”—and remember that “chimney-sweepers” is an old children’s name for the fragile “clocks” that follow the dandelion’s bright gold flower.

A Certified Wildlife Habitat. Want to attract really cool birds, butterflies, frogs, bees and critters to your yard? Start community conversations? Help your kids learn about natural science? Then undertake a simple, inexpensive project that your kids will itch to research and talk about for show and tell or extra credit: go to nwf.org/backyard/ and learn how to certify your yard as a Wildlife Habitat. Basically, it will take:
Food—native plants and/or hanging feeders. Butterflies really do love butterfly bushes and birds really do eat the seeds straight off sunflowers. Add nuts and dried fruits to seed in hanging feeders to attract “classier” birds, as the expert at a local store catering to wild bird lovers puts it.
Water for drinking and bathing—a birdbath or raingarden will do fine; a pond would be ideal.
Cover for living and raising young—native vegetation, a little pile of logs, bird or bat houses. Building supply stores and cooperative extensions often have workshops where children can make the last two themselves, and bats, incidentally, can each eat 600-1000 mosquitoes per hour.
Sustainable gardening practices—composting, mulching, maybe getting rid of part of that front lawn. Rain barrels are an excellent idea that will also cut your water bills.

A Water Garden. There are so many reasons to love water gardens. For adults, snoozing in a hammock while water ripples soothingly can be the ultimate summer “activity”. For kids, what could be more endlessly fascinating than watching the movement of water and darting fish? And the trickle of a small fountain can mask the noise from traffic or the neighbors’ noisy barbeque and make the hottest day feel cooler. A water garden is not only an immediate pleasure but also adds value to your home, and can even help it to sell faster.

Make a simple water garden in a barrel; or install a do-it-yourself pre-formed liner; or call in the experts to work their magic. Proper siting is essential (sun, but not full sun all day if your water garden will be shallow) and you’ll need water plants for filtration and to provide cover for koi, goldfish and frogs. If your children are very young, you’ll also need to consider safety.

A White Garden. Let Vita Sackville-West’s legendary White Garden at Sissinghurst inspire you. Try white roses, hydrangea, foxgloves, hostas, Shasta daisies, clematis, and Crambe cordifolia; or just explore your local garden center and farmers’ market. White gardens can be particularly lovely on summer evenings, and Hosta Grandiflora (Japonica) releases its glorious lily-like perfume only during the late afternoon and evening—as do night-blooming jasmine and the annual fast-growing climber Moonflower.

A Scent Garden. Mmm, this can be bliss, and highly stimulating for the baby in your sling as well! Start with a herb garden—you can plant herbs among the flowers if necessary; no need to isolate them. Pineapple sage grows astonishingly fast to a height of several feet and blooms with bright red tubular flowers beloved by humming birds. Include rosemary, lavender, lemon verbena, sage, and basil, and plant creeping lemon thyme between pavers. Crush a few leaves between your fingers and let children sniff. Bonus: tasty additions to you dinner.

And flowers—go easy on the Stargazer lilies as more than a few can be overpowering, but try wisteria, jasmine, honeysuckle, tea olive, Daphnes, gingers... The Dwarf Fothergilla shrub’s white flowers smell like honey, and as a bonus its blue-green foliage turns orange in the fall.

Xeriscaping. A good yard is one that you enjoy and use frequently. For a family, that means one that is kid-friendly, wherever possible with a certain amount of lawn for running and playing, trees and bushes for shade and games of hide-and-go-seek, and birds-bees-and-butterflies-attracting plants. (And chairs to pull up for outdoor meals, parties and conversations, of course.) But if you have more lawn than you need, particularly out front, think Xeriscaping.

The term means, literally, “dry landscape”, but it’s not at all about filling your yard with pebbles and cacti. Contact your local cooperative extension office (find it at caes.uga.edu/extension/statewide.cfm) for information and help with planning a yard that will devour 50% less water and take significantly less maintenance while actually improving the curb appeal of your home. Once a plan is in place, you can make alterations gradually, maybe digging up a front lawn and replacing it with plantings a little at a time.

Legends and Stories
Herbs and plants are ancient and glorious; a little curiosity will lead you to the most fascinating tales that go well beyond the florist-beloved language of flowers.

Greek scholars, for instance, used to tuck a sprig of rosemary—also known as the dew of the sea—behind their ear to help them concentrate. Mary is said to have draped her blue cloak over a rosemary bush to dry and turned its white flowers forever blue while journeying to Egypt; and now a rosemary tree will never grow higher than six feet or after the age of 33, wishing never to be older or taller than Christ.

And did you ever wonder who first thought to try a plant as a medicine? Herbalists often adhered to the doctrine of signatures, which claims that written upon every plant is a sign of which ailment it will cure. Spotted lungwort, say, with its exquisitely dappled leaves (despite its revolting name it’s one of my favorite plants) was used for tuberculosis and eczema. Unfortunately, however, the theory is not infallible, so I wouldn’t suggest experimenting. But challenge your kids. What other stories can they discover?

“The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses.”—Hanna Rion

I’ll admit it—some of my happiest hours with my kids have been spent grubbing in the earth and making a nightly visit to our neighbor’s frog pond as part of our old goodnight-moon bedtime routine. But even if you prefer not to take gardening with your kids beyond a planter of geraniums and the odd bean-plant experiment, spend a few leisurely afternoons at the Atlanta Botanical Garden—don’t miss the Children’s Garden—Callaway Gardens, or the State Botanical Garden at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Your minds and bodies will thank you.

Booklist:
A Child's Garden: 60 Ideas to Make Any Garden Come Alive for Children by Molly Dannenmaier
Gardening with Children (Brooklyn Botanic Garden All-Region Guide)
Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children by Sharon Lovejoy
Kids Container Gardening: Year-Round Projects for Inside and Out by Cindy Krezel and Bruce Curtis
Sunflower House (Books for Young Readers) by Eve Bunting
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett