Children's garden coming to Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden

The newest big building project at Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden is the Kimbrell Children's Garden.
A team broke ground on Lost Hollow on Thursday. Old World architecture and Southern horticulture will come together on a grassy hollow with a forest at its back. The design is by W. Gary Smith of New York. He is shown here.

 “This will expand our ability to offer programs to school groups,” said Jim Hoffman, the garden’s spokesman. The garden currently offers 14 programs to about 8,000 school children a year.
The opening of an Orchid Conservatory has boosted attendance by about 20 percent a year compared to 2007, Hoffman said. Lost Hollow will likely help boost admissions beyond the 90,000 who currently visit.
Attracting more families with small children is a goal when the new garden opens in fall 2014. “We hope that children will ask their parents to go to Lost Hollow,” Hoffman said.
Nearly $4 million in donations have been made for the project, to be built on about 3 of the garden’s 380 acres in Belmont. There are more than a dozen drawings for the project’s features and garden rooms, which include a pond with a castle sunken beneath the water and a cave with a giant fireplace as the entrance.

The fireplace and several other artifacts are from the estate of Daniel Stowe, the late textile executive who in 1991 set aside the meadows, woodlands and lakefront property for the garden.

Sullivan: homelifeclt.blogspot.com and @Sullivan_obs on Twitter

Read more here: http://homelifeclt.blogspot.com/#storylink=cpy