Gardening with a child. Gardening as a child.

Rosemary with lamb… a classic combination

This week is National Children’s Gardening Week, and to honour it I have been making a concerted effort to spend as much time gardening with my 2 year old son, Arthur, as possible. When I was pregnant with him I imagined hazy hours together exploring the wonders of nature as I tended a perfect garden in a new life as an earth mother in which I had great stretches of unscheduled time for horticulture (HA!).

In reality, almost every activity we have tried in the garden has ended in chaos and a lot of the knee jerk ‘Arthur, NO!!’.

He loves the process of harvesting, and it’s a great way to get small kids to enjoy veg, but as soon as he could walk we found all our cherry tomato plants stripped of their fruit, ripe or otherwise. He runs in at dinner time calling ‘Look, I picked some radishes’, his hands full of tiny radish too small to eat. Then there are his efforts at what I call ‘live heading’ where he helpfully lops all the flowers off my plants for me, or discovers an exciting insect right in the middle of a flower bed and charges after it full of enthusiasm. I had no idea that I was sowing the seeds of disaster when, last autumn, I got him to help me pot up my spring bulbs, placing crocks in the bottoms of pots, scooping in compost and arranging the fat bulbs for me. This spring, months later, I wasn’t sure if I was more horrified or impressed when I found him proudly smashing flower pots calling ‘Look Mummy! CROCKS!’. He helped me sow all my seeds this spring, and then rearranged all the labels. This has done wonders for testing my horticultural chops but when it comes to distinguishing ‘wok broc’ and collard greens I am still stumped. Above all I find smatterings of certain plants growing in everything and can only assume a certain degree of compost mixing has taken place behind my back.

But maybe the problem lies with me as an adult rather than with him. A toddler’s curiosity and wonder in a garden is to be treasured and, as is so often the case in parenting, it is our adult preconceptions about what a garden ‘should’ be that causes friction. Perhaps we could all learn something by watching children in our gardens, and by thinking back to the magic of our own early experiences with gardening and nature.

I grew up with a garden big enough to have shrubs to hide in, a little pond and various other secret corners to inhabit. According to family mythology, one of my first words was mesembryanthemum (an interesting reflection of xeriscaping trends in the 80s and 90s), and as soon as I could toddle I was off exploring the garden, terrifying my parents as I gorged myself on wild strawberries and returned stained red. I used to fish for newts in the pond with my brother and sister (my brother was brilliant at drawing them), and whilst other girls began to show an interest in mainstream cosmetics, I was trying to make garden perfume (famously giving my 5 year old sister a rash with my ‘day-lilly dreams’ concoction) and trying to wash my hair with horse-chestnut leaves. The old greenhouse was a place of secret magic and the discovery of a bucket of golden vermiculite was as thrilling to us as Tutankhamun’s tomb to Howard Carter. In all these memories, the garden was a place of mystery, of exploration, of experimentation and, above all, of freedom and independence.

Reflecting on these experiences, I realise I want to give Arthur freedom to explore and a sense of adventure alongside helping him discover the joys of nurturing that come with growing plants of your own. Nature can entertain and teach children in a way that indoor toys never can. It changes and develops, it’s unstructured, it’s dirty and immersive. But giving him these experiences is much harder than I had expected. We are lucky to have the garden we do, but it’s pretty small and there’s very little space for him to ‘run wild’. In the rush to perfect what little space we have and, I confess, to conform to the Instagram paradigm of lush veg and well-kept borders, maybe I have lost the childhood magic of chaos and dirt, mud pies, beetles, sticks and dens. Plants used to be precious regardless of how healthy they were looking or whether they were weeds or some coveted cultivar. I used to enjoy the garden without it having to ‘be’ anything other than itself.

Yesterday as Arthur abandoned sowing sunflower seeds with me and instead sat in the compost bucket and began to shovel coir down his shorts I drew a long breath, smiled and continued with the seeds myself. I have sown enough seedlings that when he decided to try to feed our cat cosmos this morning I was able to remain philosophical as I scooped them into the bin. I am trying to set parameters that will keep him safe and me sane, but in the end I am just grateful that he takes an interest, grateful that we have a garden to share with him and time to enjoy it, and determined not to crush the spark of discovery.