Editor's Roundup
USDA people in the news

Spring is turning into summer across the land, and that means lots of pre-school-age kids are spending lots of time outdoors, busy romping through local playgrounds around the country.

Roberto Morganti has been getting a kick out of watching the pint-sized dynamos in his neighborhood burn up their energy in a playground near his home. But that’s because he has a special interest in the playground: he designed and built it.

Morganti, a landscape architect working on the Forest Service’s Klamath Ranger District on the Winema National Forest in south-central Oregon, is the parent of a Head Start child. So when he heard that Head Start staffers in his home town of Klamath Falls, Ore., wanted to develop a playground at their local Head Start center, he volunteered to help.

“Then, as I began thinking about the project, I concluded that it would be nice if the kids had more than just your typical playground,” he recounted. “So I came up with a proposal to make the playground into an 'outdoor classroom’ with a 'child-scale forest’ as one of its centerpieces.”

“I wanted the kids to be able to literally feel and experience trees and other forms of nature at their height-level and scale,” he explained.

The plot of land in question was about the size of a three-car garage--“although, as I’d be working on designs, it often felt about as big as a postage stamp,” he quipped. The plot included a concrete pad, a circular sidewalk, and a storage shed as pre-existing features.

So on his own time he designed and built a playground that relied on the circular sidewalk as a path for tricycles, with low benches off to the side. Then he designed and built a landscape which included 30 dwarf Alberta spruce, numerous blue star junipers, and dwarf mugho pines. “Even when those trees mature, they’re generally less than five feet tall,” he noted. “So the kids can still relate to them--and don’t feel dwarfed themselves.”

He added about 60 dwarf euonymus shrubs on the fence-line surrounding the playground–with the intent of making the fence nearly invisible.

In the center, where there used to be a big trash pile, Morganti interjected a kid-sized smooth rock for climbing, surrounded by wood bark chips for cushion and protection during the inevitable falls.

He also designed a stepping-stone garden. “Kids spend a lot of time running hard from point A to point B,” he explained. “But with a stepping-stone structure, we get the kids to slow down as they move from point A to point B. In the process, maybe they’ll notice more of their immediate surroundings--such as crawling ants, which are really cool to kids.”

“The net effect,” he concluded, “is to offer these young visitors the chance to experience both a period of enclosure and a period of openness--and I think we accomplished that.”

According to Frank Erickson, FS’s public affairs officer on the Winema National Forest, one additional byproduct of Morganti’s efforts on behalf of the 'outdoor classroom’ with its 'child-scale forest’ is that he volunteered to be his office’s disability employment program manager.

“This experience helped add to my sensitivity and awareness of looking at things from the perspective of others,” Morganti related. “In this case, it was from the eyes, height, and perspective of active but curious pre-school-agers--and all the challenging dynamics which result from that perspective.”