The Ian Potter Children’s WILD PLAY Garden
The Ian Potter Children’s WILD PLAY Garden
The Ian Potter Children’s WILD PLAY Garden
The Ian Potter Children’s WILD PLAY Garden illustrates how landscape architecture can provide a nature based experience in which children develop a love of nature and the tools to negotiate risk, undertake inquiry, and develop social skills to build depth and resilience.
The strategy behind the design was to create a place which utilises design of nature to enhance curiosity, discovery and delight whilst allowing children to develop socially through unstructured play. Resilience comes by allowing children to negotiate risk at their own pace and in a unique and unexpected way where sensory engagement away from back lit screens abounds.
The Ian Potter Children’s WILD PLAY Garden is one of Sydney’s most densely vegetated landscapes in an urban area, where over 13,000 trees, shrubs, succulents, grasses and ground covers have been planted to mature into unique plant communities that define the different play spaces. Of the 22 tree and 57 understorey species used in this “weird and wonderful palette”, more than half are native to Australia, most of which are endemic to Sydney.