The Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew has launched its new Children’s Garden to the public, a unique and
world class destination play landscape.
The garden, covering
an area of 10,000m2 has been brought
to life by Ground Control Ltd and has taken forward Kew’s vision to complete
the detailed and technical design and construction of the project.
The garden is themed
around ‘What Do Plants Need to Grow’ and has taken its inspiration from
encouraging children to experience and build a long-lasting relationship with
nature through the creation of a play garden rather than a playground with
plants in it.
Ground Control were
appointed to the project in March 2017 and demonstrates the effective
collaboration of our in house team of Chartered Landscape Architects and
awarding Construction teams to deliver a Children’s Garden described by Richard
Barley, Head of Horticulture, Learning and Operations at Kew as “not only the best Children’s Garden in the UK but
one of the best in the world”.
Working
collaboratively with Kew to realise this exciting project within its unique
setting, the scheme showcases bespoke and engaging play environments split
across the different character zones of Air, Earth, Sun, Water and Pine Tree
Wilderness orientated around Oak Tree Circle, a 4m high walkway around the 200
year old existing Oak.
Work on the
Children’s Garden began on site in October 2017 with the implementation of the
gardens service infrastructure and framework from which the individual garden
zones have developed with the design tailored to maximise the play value in
every intervention made.
This process rings true to Ground Controls ‘can do’
and collaborative approach to projects effectively working with Kew to complete
the gardens hard landscaping, play and landscape features that have since been
complimented by the new soft landscaping of over 100 mature trees and 18,500
plants designed and installed by Kew.
The play and
landscape features have been sympathetically set amongst the maturity of the
gardens existing trees, some of which are TROBI trees of national significance.
The sensitivity of
these surroundings required Ground Control to draw upon its experience and
arboricultural consultancy capabilities to sympathetically design, specify and
construct the scheme around the existing trees and adopt specific working
methods including screw piles, hand excavation and full raised construction.
