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School gardens, natural playgrounds and outdoor classrooms have been re-gaining importance for almost 10 years.
- In 2001 The Growing Schools initiative was launched. Growing Schools provides the framework, support and resources to help deliver many other government programmes, in particular Every Child Matters, Learning Outside the Classroom, Healthy Schools, Sustainable Schools
- In 2006 the Learning Outside the Classroom Manifesto was launched and since then almost 1,700 UK organisations and individuals have signed up. In 2009 the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom was established to officially take over responsibility for the manifesto
- Ofsted’s October 2008 report evaluates the importance of learning outside the classroom and demonstrates that high quality learning outside the classroom is a significant factor in raising standards and improving personal development.
School allotments are wonderful for teaching students about healthy eating, climate change, the life cycle of plants. Edible gardens in children's centre playgrounds can become productive school gardens, feeding the school. Early Years need school gardens to be just as inspiring as the natural play areas designed for older children. All children benefit from the experience of lying under, crawling through, playing around gardens. When you add the creative curriculum benefits of writing about, drawing, measuring, singing about, dancing, discovering, selling, as well as observing the growing and then eating freshly picked fruit and vegetables you have a well educated child.
School gardens can be an extension of the classroom, a space to feel inspired to create or perform poetry or dramatic pieces, observe the wonder of science in action or simply a place to unwind. There is nothing so lovely as lying under an apple tree in blossom, breathing in the fragrant air, staring up through the leaves to clouds flitting across a blue sky on a warm spring day. When planned as part of an outdoor classroom design, or a school sensory garden the edible gardens really enrich the curriculum.
Special needs school gardens need to ensure that plants are edible as students may put things in their mouths. In a sensory garden, edible plants make the taste sensation come alive. Through discovery in a sensory garden setting knowledge can be transferred to more natural settings.
Children who learn to safely eat ‘wild foods’ develop an appreciation for the natural landscape. Blackberries come from bramble patches, not plastic wrapped supermarket containers! Natural play also encourages children to experiment with the world around them. Edible gardens add to those experiences.
 Vacant growing space is all around us. If you do not have land within your grounds, check out Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Landshare scheme . You can register as an individual looking for land, as someone keen to grow things, someone with land that you could share with another group, or as someone who can facilitate the process locally. Remember roof tops can provide room to grow, and walls can have plants grown up or down them as well as hanging space. Fruit and vegetables don't need to grow on the ground.
Edible gardens can be designed as part of special needs gardens, sensory gardens, or simply espaliered along the tennis court fence! They are an important part of natural play, work well with outdoor classroom design, and are an essential component of school sensory garden design.
Sensory gardens need to do more than provide a smelly leaf and colourful flower. They must engage all the senses, providing stimuli for all parts of the student’s young, growing body. Sand and water play offers tactile stimulation which together with measuring and pouring adds depth to maths lessons.
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We run workshops for teachers and community groups on Basic orchard design (fruit tree varieties, rootstocks, spacing).
Topics covered include:
• Materials needed
• Nurseries and equipment suppliers
• How to plant an apple tree
• How to involve children and adults
• Local apple varieties
• Linking to fruit cookery
• Visits to professional fruit growers
If you are interested in attending or hosting a workshop, please contact Gayle Souter-Brown for details. We can come to you or you can travel to us!
The vine covered arbour in the photo could easily be outside your school or community hall! It is easy to create beautiful, edible garden and outdoor classroom design with a little imagination.
You might want to remove the candelabra, and replace the potted flowers with a mixture of ornamentals and salad greens, peppers, tomatoes and herbs, but the point is that special needs gardens, sensory garden designs, natural play spaces and edible gardens need not be boring, formulaic nor utilitarian spaces!
You might have a plain floor of concrete or asphalt, but it can easily be transformed with paint, inset personalised tiles, or planted with inset ground cover herbs, raised beds, grow bags and containers.
Take our ideas and imagine your own space. Inspiration for your edible garden, to enhance natural play or a special needs sensory garden is the thing you can take away and think,"Yes I could use that space. We could grow fresh fruit and vegetables to feed our school community."
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- Once you have canvassed the ideas and opinions of staff, students and the local community, you will need someone to pull all the ideas together.
- You will need an overall plan. This document will detail the concept, scaled drawings of the site including services, and detail the materials to be used.
- Funding can come from your local authority or any number of community and environmental grants (Note: grants will generally pay for the designer's fees as a direct cost of the project ) Please contact us for help with the design of your new community garden or grounds project .
To see projects we have worked on and ideas for future developments, please click here.
Here is one example from an infant & nursery school in Berkshire
"We use our grounds for practical learning about the seed-to-seed cycle. We plant willow wherever it will grow and harvest it for projects around the school and to make basket with in design technology. In Spring, the children gather the daffodils they planted in the previous Autumn to honour their mothers for Mothering Sunday. They have earned this right by collecting the bulbs on shopping trips to the local garden centre, using them for maths work and then planting them. Each child learns how to pick responsibly, and what is safe to touch and which plants are best left alone.
We feel It is important to offer the children the environment where they can make these distinctions, not to attempt to remove everything that appears to be harmful, but to show the children how to recognise plants and their properties. We have planted traditional healing plants such as willow, comfrey and feverfew and wherever the stinging nettle grows, the soothing dock leaf is nearby. Dandelions and daisies spread across the field in a carpet of white and yellow - an opportunity to estimate how many in a given area for maths, to observe how they open and close with the heat and cool of the day for science, to collect for art and daisy chains, to enjoy what many gardeners might dismiss as a troublesome weed."
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