A Trip to the Centre

I love taking the kids to see various public gardens, but my enthusiasm for such ventures is not often matched by the kids. Nothing (or at least nothing that they might want) to buy, no rides, no monkey bars, et cetera et cetera. However, I have to say that once there, the kids are usually just as happy as I am.

This was certainly the case last Friday when Damon and I took our kids and a couple of their friends to The Horticultural Centre of The Pacific, known to many as Glendale Gardens. This is a gorgeous 103 acres in Saanich, of which 9 acres are landscaped with public demonstration gardens. Admission is free for kids under 12, and $11 for adults (members are free). Also on the grounds are a library, garden shop, bistro, and the Pacific Horticultural College. The Centre offers children's summer camps, as well as many courses and workshops for adults.

The most heavily cultivated part of the garden is laid out in a loose grid pattern, culminating in a gorgeous round patio, or gathering place. All of these gardens are on a slope which looks down across a field to a large, sparkling pond, of the Beatrix Potter ilk.

The first garden we looked at, and my favourite, is the kids garden. The best thing about it is this teeny play house with a planted roof that the kids are welcome to play in. Other features of this garden are a rain stick, gumboots overflowing with flowers, a little angel on a swing in a shrub, and various planted wheelbarrows.

There is also a bird and butterfly garden, vegetable garden, dry garden, Mediterranean garden, fruit trees, hardy plants, roses, hardy fuschias, a winter garden, zen garden, heather garden, ornamental grass garden, an orchard, an ethnobotany trail, and more. And the best part is that almost all of the plants are labeled, making it a great place to learn which plants work well in which environments. I would suggest that anyone looking to create their own garden should go here after analyzing the specific attributes and liabilities of their own site.

The kids, of course, don't care much about the attributes of their site...but they played tag and hide and seek to their hearts content, stopping only to devour the summer fruit, cheese and cracker snack that we had packed for them. They picnicked in the Zen garden, which, while not as breathtaking as the Japanese Garden at Hatley Castle, is lovely and peaceful to be in, and features a raked stone garden as well as a stream, koi pond and tea house.

This was a great way to spend the afternoon with the kids, and definitely worth the price of admission.

The Garden Club

Life is incredibly busy for all of us, and it seems especially so for working moms with young kids. This is why I have not exactly been a joiner over the last few years of busyness with my children and with the design and installation work at Greenspace Designs.

I have felt pangs of guilt with every email sent home from school practically begging for parents to come out and join the PAC, but of course not enough guilt to cause me to actually do anything about it. At least not until I received the email asking for parents to come out for a school garden club. Now that, I thought to myself, sounds like something I could get into.

I went to the first meeting, where I met a bunch of really great parents who are passionate about the importance of food gardening, and of instilling this same passion in the small ones we know.

And so was born the Sir James Douglas Garden Club. There are two main objectives of the garden club. The first is huge and may take us a year or more before we are able to take action, and the second is already just fabulous.

So, firstly, we aim to create a school garden on the grounds of Sir James Douglas School. This would be a teaching garden that would be integrated into the regular teaching curriculum of the school whenever relevant. The big vision includes a rain garden that filters run-off from the near-by parking area, a deer-resistant demonstration garden, three-bin composting systems, a simple water collection system, areas to gather for classes, a butterfly garden, and of course a large area to grow food crops. That's the big, long term goal that we are beginning to plan and organize a proposal for. To start, we would be quite happy with a little field of pumpkins that the kids could tend.

The second goal is to involve the kids in a weekly garden club over the lunch hour, for which we have been allotted a little shady garden outside the school gymnasium. For our first club meeting, we expected our own children and perhaps, if we were lucky, one or two of their friends. The activity we planned was for the kids to begin to designing the new garden, which we are going to plant with edible native plants. We had it all figured out and it was going to be calm, organized, and fun.

Well, that noon bell rang and the first kids began to filter through the library door. Oh, good lord. Kids just started to swarm in, all aflutter, talking and laughing with each other. I couldn't even see the last kids in the line! It was chaos! It was the place to be! It was garden club! Garden Club attracts 120 kids? We were obviously onto something.

We fumbled through that first meeting and immediately afterword came to the decision that we were going to have to make two groups and alternate each week. But we were pumped. This has go to tell us something about our kids, right?

We asked them what they liked about gardening that first day and again and again they mentioned spending time with their mums, dads, and grandparents. This was what they loved (and of course eating sweet, ripe strawberries and fresh shelling peas). There is such a strong connection between gardening and that lovely, quiet time spent with family in the garden. No one is rushing off to work, texting while 'playing' with their kids, answering the phone or doing the dishes (something my youngest particularly objects to). It is just sweet, slow time together. And that's what so many of our kids are missing I think.

Anyway, garden club has been absolutely fabulous, and although we have not finished planting our garden bed quite yet (we are still working on the red tape associated with irrigation, if you can believe it) , the kids have had a great time and so have we. The kids planted sunflowers, divided strawberries and planted them, dug for worms, weeded the garden, painted labels for their own gardens, and got good and dirty doing it.

This past Saturday the garden club and the Fairfield Community Gardens Association commandeered the kids art tent at the Moss Street Market for a repeat of our label decorating day. We also had literature available in support of the Fairfield Community garden, for which the proposed site is just behind a large field at Sir James Douglas School. It was a great day spent hanging with kids, and was a wonderful end to the first year of the SJD Garden Club (and by the way, we are always looking for more parent volunteers...)