In Berlin, a birthplace of playgrounds – of the kindergarten – there is a child’s play space, Kolle 37, set aside to be built by children.
It’s a dreamscape of adventure.
It’s what I’d like to facilitate: the making of places for child’s play. Creative, shaped by them, where imaginations can unravel, thoughts spool wild. Cubbyhouses, rope swings, climbing frames. Make it for their bodies, their minds, their spirit.
Make it crazy, beautiful, risk-taking, thought-provoking, asking questions always of us, and the children.
But for now, such a challenge is off-limits for someone like me.
To follow Australian Standards for play-equipment is easy enough (common-sense measurements for finger, foot, head entrapment, fall heights, etc), but schools and councils have other regulations, risk-adverse, often counter-intuitive and socially-conservative.
Monkey bars, for instance, are considered an acceptable risk, because for an adult they are easily understood - they’ve been part of the childhood experience for as long as all can remember. But set a few blueblock stepping stones in the ground, and they might be viewed as radical, subversive.
The best playground, anyway, is nature. A fallen tree. Ocean-damp sand. A wave. Stones in a river. A grassed hill to roll down.
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It felt good to be working in a children’s space again.
It reminded of why I chose to do what I do.
A background in architecture, an interest in design, time on the tools, wanting to create a community, and the isolating effects of early parenthood - compounded for a dad among all the mums waiting at the kindergarten gate at pick-up.
Volunteer work at our boys’ child-care, kindergarten, primary school, led to little jobs that led to this.
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Thank you to Sally and all at Renown who commissioned me to make three garden boxes for their much-loved community kindergarten in South Yarra.
It’s a privilege to contribute to the spaces of young children, to enhance their world with colour, materials, ideas, possibilities. I hope these garden boxes do this, for many years to come.
What I try to do is set an example.
By using what we have already, by salvaging, recycling, reimagining materials.
As with these three water-efficient wicking bed garden boxes.
Each are made from ‘food grade’ IBC tanks cut in half, clad in a frame from lengths of pine (all sourced from builder’s skips!) and hardwood floorboards rescued from landfill. Most of the boards on these boxes are from a 1920s bungalow in Elwood (about the same vintage as Renown), with Launceston printed on their underside – most likely mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) milled one hundred years ago, from trees that might have been one hundred years older still.
It is wise wood, beautiful timber.
I wanted them to look like little boats, which in some way is what they are.
I added splashes of colour, curios for the children. On the front box, I made the word ARK from metal road signs, creating an image for passers-by that’s likely to provoke thought, questionings. An ark is a boat, biblical with its connotations, a refuge, nurturing, a vessel of safety.
Maybe this is also what a kindergarten is.
And maybe this kindergarten garden box can teach others, inspire them, to grow food, to look after plants, be sustainable, live smaller lives, touching the world more gently. I hope many might be touched by it, full of edible greens in winter, and in summer maybe tall with corn stalks (like ship masts?) or cheerful sunflowers, open and ready to welcome children.
A yellow ARK, I’m hoping it might become a little part of the next one hundred years of Renown.
On the other boxes I affixed road sign art, each framed with offcuts sourced from a South Yarra picture framer (she was thrilled I could use what otherwise was going to be tossed out). And some of the boards are painted with words or colours of meaning.
I rode my bicycle there this afternoon and added some more daubs of white paint. On the boxes and elsewhere in the playground. I think it is good for the children to see this.
Creativity.
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From little things…
Children planted sweetcorn and climbing bean seeds
To see how these wicking bed boxes work - and a schoolteacher friend has calculated they use about one-fifth less water and produce more abundant crops than normal kitchen garden boxes - please see https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/factsheets/building-a-wicking-bed/9435452.
They are not playgrounds, but they are architecture for the school yard, for a play space.
And they are an opportunity.
And yes, I involved the children in setting one of them up: getting dirt under their fingernails, looking for worms, giving them jobs, discussing the merits of bugs, talking about compost, have them feel and smell the soil.
Then those who helped the most, I took them on a wheelbarrow ride around their yard, a jogtrot with precious cargo.
I think they enjoyed it.
One of the mums said the children now call me the ‘insect teacher’.
I told her I’d like to be known as Professor Worm.
