I love visiting different places for children to play. One space I’ve never blogged about has been backyards. Children can spend a lot of time in their garden or backyard and so making this a play-friendly space is a wonderful thing to do.

This week I’ve been working in Adelaide, with and for Nature Play SA which is an organisation that celebrates and promotes nature play in all its guises within South Australia. Their education manager, Maria Taylor, has kindly hosted me and her two children have been showing me around their backyard space. It’s been hard to capture the intricacies of this space. I counted at least four different types of swing plus a hanging chair. Two can be seen in a couple of photos – the life ring and flotation device in the tree.

What is immediately apparent is that this is a combination of parent skill, know-how and expertise combined with the interests of the children. Their dad is a keen rock climber and it can be seen in so many ways. For example, the music chimes have been created from old rope and figure-of-eight belay devices. Maria’s 8-yr old daughter is all ready proficient at swinging and using the hangboard. It’s like a compact version of monkey bars except you don’t need a lot of space. This is much more challenging than your normal climbing wall that children are often given. Not least it involves Maria having to decide how she will reach the holds as they are a good couple of metres off the ground.

There are ropes and pulleys around various parts of the garden that blend in too well to be caught in a photograph. You can just see a rope line above Mollie’s head and going right. This provides a system for moving objects to and from the look out tower. You can also see a mud kitchen in the right-hand side of the photo.

The look out tower really is a look out tower. It enables you to see over the back fence to the railway line at the back. It actually has two ladders to climb up and into it.

Below is a signal which can be moved when trains pass by to tell them to stop or slow down. I love homemade constructions with a purpose.

The backyard has all sorts of cubbies – wee dens for children to hang out. Below is the one under the lookout tower.

Very often, backyards become the parent’s dream and not the children’s. Here there was lots of shared projects that have been created. Checkout the cubby below which emerged when the family were doing a big tidy and sort out of the house. Lewis thought this was a better use of his time to create a cubby from the old gum tree poles he found:

You get an even better view from this angle. Look carefully at the cabin – can you spot the escape route beside the door, near the ground…

There’s lots of loose rocks, stumps and other materials around the garden all waiting to to be played with.

And far away, down a little alleyway is The Secret Garden. I’m not showing you where, but we know fairies live there…

Finally – a special thanks to Lewis for showing me all the best bits of his garden. When I last saw him, he was designing a rocket to get to the moon and drawing tickets for a special show.

This blog post was originally published in June 2018.