Find That Plant… a Kids Gardening Game

August 1st, 2017

   Plants have a hard time competing for toddler attention.

Leona has found a match for her red-leafed plant.

   They’re non-animated, they don’t interact (except for the touch-anxious sensitive plant), and they don’t sing, dance, or do silly things.

   So when our 4-year-old granddaughter came to visit last month, I tried to think of a fun way to get her outside in the gardens.

   Little Leona loves playing hide-and-go-seek, so I came up with an offshoot in which the plants do the “hiding” and she does the seeking.

   First, I had Leona cover her eyes while I went into the yard and cut off a flower part.

   “No peeking!”

   She liked that part right off the bat. Something sneaky was going on, and she was going to be surprised.

   I started with a big blue hydrangea flower. I gave it to Leona and told her she had to figure out where in the yard it came from.

   To help, I told her she was getting warmer when she headed in the right direction and colder when she wasn’t.

   Within about a minute, she located the hydrangea bushes. I had her hold the cut hydrangea next to the ones on the bush and asked her if they matched.

   “They do! Yay!! You win!!!”

   It’s not often that a hydrangea bush excites a 4-year-old, but it happened.

   I next clipped a red-leaf alternanthera, figuring that color would stand out. After a no-match by a patch of dark-leafed coleus, she found the band of them out front and “won” again.

   We played a few more times and probably could have kept going for much longer if the dratted blackflies wouldn’t have been biting her and flying in her eyes.

   As you might guess, Leona decided that she should have a turn being the hider with me as the seeker. She right away pointed out my new trial kniphofia variety – the one with the single bloom of toddler-calling bright orange.

   Hmmm. Sacrifice it in the name of plant awareness or try to talk her into something else?

   I decided to go with logic. I told her that if she cut off the only flower, I wouldn’t have anything to match it to. So a better choice would be something that had a lot of flowers.

   It worked. The kniphofia was spared.

Leona hiding her eyes.

   With help from Grammy (not a good idea to give pruners to a 4-year-old and close your eyes), Leona set out to find a secret plant.

   She picked an orange-blooming coneflower. I played dumb and misfired a few times while Leona yelled, “Colder! Colder!”

   Finally, I found the right plant and earned my cheers.

   In each case, I told Leona the names of the plants, which she did very well trying to pronounce since they sounded like funny words.

   The game also gave the chance to get her to appreciate each plant a little.

   “See why they call this one a coneflower? It has a big, fat cone in the middle. And that orange flower you liked? It’s called a red hot poker. I’m going to go get it and poke you with it!”

   The best lesson was the one that came after Leona tried to put the hydrangea flower back on the bush.

   “No, Sweetie, that won’t work. Once you cut off a flower, you can’t glue it back on. But you can sometimes turn it into a new baby plant if you stick it in water.”

   We showed her how by the cuttings that Grammy was trying to root in a vase.

   One lesson we learned is that toddlers like to pull plants. The day before, I had Leona in the vegetable garden picking carrots. She liked seeing the foot-long surprises come out of the ground, although it wasn’t fascinating enough to actually get her to eat those surprises.

   While I was hunting down the orange coneflower, Leona saw another coneflower – probably one she thought would be a good candidate for the next game. So she ripped a chunk of it out.

   The gardening part of my brain wanted to yell, “No, don’t do that!” But the grandfather part won out and said, “Oh, that’s a coneflower, too. Thanks, Sweetie.”

   The last thing we should do as gardeners trying to pass on a love of plants is to yell at kids for doing the “wrong thing” in the garden – or to discourage them or make them feel like they’re getting into trouble.

   That’s a quick way to end not only a Find That Plant game but any brewing interest in appreciating plants.

   I think it’s a good tradeoff to sacrifice stomped petunias and yanked coneflowers now for what could turn out to be a positive lifelong interest later.

   In so many of the gardener interviews I’ve done, the gardeners told me that what stoked their love of gardening was growing up and being in the garden with Grandma or Grandpa.

   Maybe Leona will grow up with no interest in gardening, but I figure at least she’ll have the memories of winning those Find That Plant games.