A garden full of green lights

How do you make kids feel at home somewhere as grown-up as the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens? In designing the Helen and Peter Bing Children’s Garden, which opens June 19, botanical director Jim Folsom’s solution was to shrink the place. “One of the ways we’re making it a children’s garden is by giving children powers adults do not have,” he says. “Children have free run. Adults can get to every space, but it’s harder for them.”

Now, here is an adult who understands kids. During the last eight years, throughout the conception, design and construction, Folsom realized not only that kids need to leave adults behind from time to time, but that cute is overrated. He rejected bright colors, plastic and all manner of storybook whimsy.

He also declined to be ostentatiously educational. He passed on using docents, those avidly chattering adults, with their educators’ talent for making interesting things dull.

Instead, he and Northern Californian sculptor Ned Kahn made what Folsom describes as “a miniature Huntington,” a thoroughly classical garden that favors children in only one obvious way: scale. In the connecting points of the garden’s four quarters and nine sculpture installations, the gates, tunnels and passages cater to people ages 7 or younger. The rest of us have to duck, crawl or go around.

While touring the garden recently, Folsom explained some of the challenges he faced. The dignity of the setting was never up for grabs. The garden occupies a courtyard of a thoroughly classical quadrant, surrounded by new teaching greenhouses, a science center and a tropical conservatory. To the north stands the estate’s mausoleum and, beyond, Mt. Wilson and the San Gabriel Mountains. A bouncy castle wouldn’t have played well.

So instead of a playground, Folsom created a sunken garden surrounded with a rim of lawn and formal hedge. It gives the new space the quality of a discovered ruin. “We went through a phase of wanting it to seem like we dug it up and found it,” Folsom says. He then played on the excavation theme by dotting the place with broken columns and urns. The lowering of the space also diffused noise for surrounding offices and created lookouts for parents to watch their children.

The formal entrance is at the southern end, opposite a vaulting conservatory nearing the end of construction. There is nothing conspicuously kiddie. The first sign that this is the children’s garden is a half-moon arbor over the center gate with just enough headroom to admit the average 7-year-old. An 8-year-old might find himself going through either of a pair of side entrances for adults.

As you move through the garden’s quadrants, the low detours are repeated at key intersections. Suddenly the elegance of the joke registers. The “Alice in Wonderland” aspect is here, but in a form that Lewis Carroll, not Disney animators, would relish. Instead of giving children cartoon rabbits, Folsom has given them rabbit holes.

In every other respect, the garden could be for adults. It’s left up to us to deduce the theme of earth, air, water and fire, to notice (or not) the perfectly balanced axes of the layout. The sculptures -- conceived by Kahn with Folsom -- are so entertaining, they could be in any modern garden. Given the sensory delight they offer, they probably should be.

It’s tempting to describe the foot-dipping, sand-grabbing, water-touching, fog-enveloping, jaw-dropping delights that Folsom and Kahn have laid on, but that would be worse than giving away the end of a good mystery. It would also disrespect the most impressive quality of this garden: its restraint. Folsom and Kahn have trusted kids to think for themselves. They can react to a cave filled with prism light or yawn and move on to the “self-centered globe” with Los Angeles at the top.

By the time you have toured the garden twice, it hits you: There is not a single sign saying “Don’t ... “ or “Keep off ... “ or “No

Not every garden designer is proud of including a bathroom with a changing bed on site, but Folsom points his out. “This means if you need to change a baby, you don’t need to leave the garden or worry who’s watching your other children.”

All this kindness. In case you’re wondering, there is a catch. By the time children graduate this garden, Folsom’s got more plans for them. “We’re a cradle-to-grave garden,” he says. Look over the wall and there is the stately campus with greenhouses and laboratories that could see a child through a career in botany.

At least this is the idea on the drawing board. However, Folsom is too good a scientist to predict his results. He knows what he hopes will happen when the garden opens to the public in three weeks -- that kids will learn about nature through play. But he’s not placing bets. “We’re going to see children use it the way we never envisioned. After it opens, we’ll find out what it means.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The hot list

Helen and Peter Bing Children’s Garden: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Opens June 19. Free with admission: adults, $12.50; seniors, $10; students, $8.50; children ages 5 to 11, $5; age 4 and younger, free. (626) 405-2100 or www.huntington.org