GARDENING WITH CHILDREN
It's important to nurture a child's relationship with the earth.

PERSONALIZING A CHILD'S GARDEN
Ask a child to describe the perfect garden and you are likely to get a very different answer from the one you would give yourself. Would you include a place to hide? To play in the mud? That's why, if you have the room, it makes sense to give a child his or her own garden space.

Linda Mazar, gardener, teacher, and creator of two web sites, Linda's Garden and Kid's Garden, provided one for her son and let him make the space very much his own. Here's how to do the same for your child:

• Locate the garden close to the swing set and sandbox.
• Put up a little white fence and let the child paint a sign that identifies the owner of the garden.
• Mix up some “quick crete” -- instant concrete -- and form it into stepping stones where your child can make hand and foot prints. Then place the stepping stones around the garden.
• Create a hiding space -- a teepee formed out of scarlet runner beans tied to and growing up a trellis made out of branches. This is a perfect place to explore bugs and other critters.
• Create a scarecrow using the child's old clothes.
• Let your child put a pink flamingo in the garden or whatever else appeals to his or her imagination.

FAMILY GARDENING

QUICK TRICKS Kids can grow potatoes in a plastic garbage bag. Fill the bag halfway with a combination of compost and gardening soil. Make small holes in the bag for water drainage. In it, plant some seed potatoes that have sprouts, making sure they are covered by the soil. Water well, and continue to water as needed. As the sprouts appear above the soil line, add more soil. Harvest the new potatoes as they gradually mature.

The key to gardening with kids, says Patti Kraemer-Doell, family garden co-ordinator at the New York Botanical Gardens, is “letting them experience it themselves. We have tried to guide them, but not tell them to put the sunflowers here and the tomatoes there. The emphasis is on developing their imagination and their appreciation for being out in the garden.”

Guidance comes in the form of a string grid that is stretched across a planting bed, which divides it into one-foot squares. Kids get advice about how many seeds or seedlings to put in each square and how deep to plant them. Volunteers show kids pictures of how the full-grown plants will look, so they understand how much room each plant needs.

Theme gardens have been a big hit in the program, and are easy to do in a home garden. Try a barnyard garden, suggests Kraemer-Doell, using plants whose names have associations with barnyard animals -- lambs ears (Stachys byzantina), hen and chicks (Echeveria), and cowslip (Pulmonaria), for example. Let kids grow a salsa garden, with all sorts of tomatoes, hot peppers, onions, and cilantro. A pizza garden can have basil, oregano, and tomatoes. In a Persian carpet garden, kids can focus on colored flowers. A seed garden can include plants that disperse their seeds in different ways, from milkweed (Asclepias) to sunflowers (Helianthus).

SMART MOVES To instill a love of gardening, make it fun for kids, not a chore. Here are some ways to make that happen: Give kids tasks appropriate to their age. Very little ones can sprinkle some water from a small can. Slightly older ones can plant some seeds -- but maybe only 10 now and 10 later. Older kids can take on bigger projects that give them a sense of accomplishment and pride, and results they can show off. Keep your expectations realistic. Most kids just won't enjoy weeding for more than a few minutes. Grow surprising, out-of-proportion things, such as giant sunflowers and small pumpkins. Grow colorful things. Look for vivid reds, purples, and yellows when shopping for plants. Start growing seeds indoors under lights or on the window sill, so kids have seedlings by outdoor planting time.

Kraemer-Doell also suggests trying a sunflower house. Let kids plant sunflower seeds in a square, leaving space for a door in front. As the sunflowers grow, put a hay fence around them for protection and stake if necessary. Plant morning glories or sweet peas around the base of each sunflower, and they will grow up the stems, eventually forming a roof over the top. By summer's end, kids will have a sunflower house to play in.

Some kids might just want to play in the garden, says Kraemer-Doell. At the family garden, there's a special place set aside just for digging and looking at insects and worms. It's a very popular spot.

GARDENING FOR CITY KIDS
If you are an urban parent worried that your child will never put hand to soil, check to see if there's a botanical garden near you. Many have programs that introduce kids to gardening. In Montreal, the Botanical Garden has had a program for kids since the 1930s. In the Youth Gardens (Jardins-jeunes), each kid has his or her own 6- by 14-foot plot. The kids meet twice a week, from planting time in spring until fall harvest, to learn all about the joys of gardening.

The Chicago Botanic Garden's program works with the schools to teach kids about gardening. The program begins with teacher training at the start of the school year, blossoms in the classroom during the winter, and comes to fruition in spring and summer when classes get to plant and maintain their own plots. In every plot, there are marigolds, sunflowers and snapdragons. Vegetables include basics like tomatoes, carrots, and lettuce, with more unusual choices, such as kohlrabi and jalapeno peppers. The kids make weekly trips to the Botanic Garden from May through August so they can cultivate the soil, plant, water, weed, and best of all, harvest the crop!

A lesson kids learn from gardening, says Sara Fretzin, the Chicago program's coordinator, is that it's okay to make mistakes. Along the way the kids may lose some plants, or decide they don't like others, but that is all part of the experience.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE EARTH

You can grow a menagerie of plants and shrubs: Bearberry Butterfly bush Cardinal flower Catnip Dogtooth violet Foxglove Fawnlily Goatsbeard Ostrich fern Oxeye daisy Pussy willow Sheep laurel Tiger lily

Andy Lipkis is president of Treepeople, an organization dedicated to inspiring the people of Los Angeles to take personal responsibility for the urban forest -- educating, training, and supporting them as they plant and care for trees and improve their neighborhoods. In a certain sense, it all started with gardening.

As a young child, Lipkis tended vegetable gardens at his grandmother's house. When he was 14, at a summer camp in the mountains, he had the transformative experience that led to Treepeople. He and a group of other teens reclaimed a dead piece of forest, used by the camp as a baseball field and parking lot, as a picnic garden. They stripped off the tar, roto-tilled and cultivated the soil, and planted smog-resistant trees and a lawn. It was back-breaking physical work, “yet it was the greatest joy,” says Lipkis, “because we saw the profound difference we could make with our caring and creativity. Everyone was turned on by what we could do with our hands.”

Treepeople's extensive education program focuses on providing new generations of kids with the same realization. Kids learn how to analyze the environmental problems in their own ecosystems -- their backyards and schoolyards -- and think about how trees can provide solutions.