Creating an Adventure Garden

Perhaps one of the most enjoyable things about having a garden is that you can design it to be just about anything you want it to be. Your garden can be something straight out of a Victorian romance, to something as enchanting as a Fairy world. One type of garden that many people overlook is something called an adventure garden. Creating an adventure garden isn't that difficult, and can actually hold something for just about everyone.

• General idea. If you have read the classic tale The Secret Garden, then you have a rough idea of what an adventure garden is supposed to be like. Ideally an adventure garden is designed to give children a place away from their parents that they can claim as "secret." Typically this type of garden design is limited by one overwhelming factor, which is space. To get the bare minimum of what you are looking for, you simply need to have enough space where you can set up a small tent. Simply put, this means that you need to set aside an area of your garden or landscape that can be dedicated primarily for the use of children.
• Accents. To get the most out of your adventure garden, you need to have the right kind of accent. As with any type of garden, this could very well be one of the most difficult aspects of creating an adventure garden. The accessories that you choose have to fit two different criteria. The first is that it has to be appealing to children, and the second is that it needs to fit in with the rest of your home.
• Use natural help. Wherever you can, use as many natural items as possible to help create a sense of adventure. Some examples of these are things like sand pits, trees with swings or tree houses, soft grasses, vines as screens, or trunks that have been cut into various sizes to create a climbing area. The best kinds of adventure gardens are those that use as much of the natural world as possible, or at the very least allow you to enhance the natural world.
• Take precautions. When you are planning or creating your adventure garden, be sure that you are also taking the proper precautions. This means that any equipment or accents that you use should be those that are easily maintained. For example, unless you add a filtering system into any water feature that you may have, you will need to periodically empty out the water to avoid stagnation. Anywhere that there is a climbing area should also have some kind of a padded, or really soft, surface that someone could land upon.