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Gardening With Kids... Part 2
by Kelly Marshall, Markham Board Member and Garden Designer
Last week we covered two options for gardening with kids: edible plants and sensory plants. Then there are the plants that are just weird and are worth having simply for the interest and conversation they provide. These are the oddballs. This is the one time you can put aside your goals of having a flowing garden bed where colors and textures complement each other, creating a scene worthy of a Sunset photo shoot. These are there just for the 'cool' factor.
 | | Blue Gama ("Eyebrow Grass") |
First up, one of my favorites: Bouteloua gracilius, left,
(Blue Grama), or as it's known in our garden, Eyebrow Grass. This is a native warm season grass that's often touted as a lawn substitute. We have just one small clump of it in our garden, but when its seed heads form and each stem holds a dainty looking eyebrow at the top, my kids love it. It truly looks like a bunch of floating eyebrows
 | | Rattlesnake Grass |
Another favorite is Briza media (Rattlesnake Grass), (right). This is a clumping grass that blooms with tall airy stems in late Spring and early Summer. Straw colored inflorescences look like tiny rattles and when shaken, sound like them too.
 | | Balloon Flower |
Platycodon grandiflorous (Balloon Flower) (left) is beautiful with its purple, pink or white blooms. But more interesting to kids is when the blooms are not yet open, because they resemble puffed up balloons just waiting to take to the sky. This seems to be used more commonly in the Midwest and on the East Coast but it should do fine here as long as it gets plenty of water and some light shade in our hottest locations. As a bonus, the cultivar 'Komachi' keeps its balloon shape because the buds never fully open.
 | | Money Plant |
If your kids are like mine, they like to 'harvest' things in the garden when they are pretending to cook or mix things together in buckets and bowls. The re-seeding annual Lunaria annua (Money Plant) (left) is a good candidate for this, with its spent seedpods resembling translucent coins. The stems are also popular for using in dried flower arrangements.
 | | Chinese Lantern Plant |
Physalis alkekengi (Chinese Lantern Plant) (right) is a perennial often grown as an annual, and probably best used in a pot since it can spread rapidly underground. White flowers are followed by berries encased in a papery orange husk, resembling, you guessed it, colorful Chinese lanterns. This is another plant that is often used in dried arrangements.
 In a kid's garden I'm designing for a client, we've included many of these plants in our plans, but we've taken it a step farther and are working to create even more of an experience for the kids. We are building a living fedge (fence + hedge = fedge) using willow rods ordered from an online grower. These will be planted in the ground close together in two rows spaced about 4'apart, to form a living arbor for the kids to venture through and into their part of the garden. This tunnel will be formed as the flexible willow rods are bent, shaped, and tied together at the top to form the ceiling of the arbor. They will need to be pruned a couple times a year to maintain their shape, but other than that, they are very low maintenance. In another part of this same garden, we are using bamboo poles to form the structure for a teepee. We'll grow beans on them to form a seasonal cover for the kids as well, creating just one more space, and experience that will last a lifetime.
Whether it's harvesting fresh food for dinner, watching ladybugs in their many lifecycles on Achillea millefolium (Yarrow), or listening to kids laugh as they chase each other through a living willow arbor, I assure you there's something out in the garden for each of you-besides dandelions.
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