ABSTRACT
Andrew Marvell Many of us have childhood memories of dandelion clocks, hoar frost suspended in a spider’s web, frozen puddles, grass wet with morning dew. Children living in cities are often deprived of such simple experiences, spending a large part of their early years indoors or in uninspired manmade environments. Carefully planned outdoor space can provide countless opportunities, not only for play and social experience but for first-hand learning about living things that no book can teach. There is nothing new about this. Margaret McMillan (1927) in her classic book, The Nursery School, first published in 1919, thought the garden should be ‘enticing’, with trees, herbs and scented flowers as well as having exciting apparatus made out of natural materials (in contrast to the playground equipment of the time). Sometime in the rest of the twentieth century this vision was lost.
