The overarching theme of our prompts is Community. For June and July we are working on the prompt Gardens, Parks, and Greenspaces. When I travel, I love to visit gardens and arboretums in the places I visit. The carefully curated plant selections can be very inspirational. I usually take mental notes about what I could do to my own 6-acre plot of land if only I had the water. As I’ve mentioned before (here, here, and here), I live in in a pseudo-rural neighborhood in a Mediterranean climate. We don’t have abundant water, so most of the land is native vegetation, or what most people would call weeds. So as much as I admire the gardens I visit, most of them would not be appropriate for this parcel. So I just dream about what could be.
But then I think back to the places I played most when I was a kid. They weren’t parks, they were greenspaces. They were wild and kind of scary, like “real nature.”
In Alaska, we had the “Little Woods.”
It was a little wooded area in a depression in the middle of a U.S. Air Force base housing development that for most of the year was either covered in snow or too muddy to play in. But for a few months of the year it was magic. We set off with our snacks and wagons, and built forts with blankets. If we wandered too far in, quicksand-like mud and the bears were sure to get us.
In Texas, we had the “Sewer.”
Not a real sewer, but a drainage ditch. Part of it was cemented in, but where the cement ended, the adventures began. Again, if you went too far down the ditch, the cactus thorns were enormous and the huge bull waited just past the fence.
On my property, my grandkids have the “Secret Lawn.”
It’s a small, flat area next to a creek with real green grass, even in the summer. They search for oak galls and throw rocks in the creek. But, again, if they venture too far it becomes wild. The blackberries with their deadly thorns and creepy snakes or other critters rustle in the dry underbrush.
As much as communities need parks and gardens, kids need greenspaces that can be wild and kind of scary.
One of the places we lived had an undeveloped parcel across the street from our neighborhood. There were open fields, wooded areas and, the best, wild blackberry brambles. I collected the berries and my little brother collected the snakes. Mother was so blessed (?!?) by our adventures!
Down by the little creek on the citrus ranch near our house in Whittier CA, eucalyptus trees towering and smelling like Vicks Vaporub, tiny crawfish on the shallow water.
That sounds magical, too, Bobbe.
I agree. I was raised in the country in Western NY and spent most of the hours of the woods around a lake. Wonderful life especially for children.
I can just imagine it, Barb.