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Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team

here at the magazine. Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

As parents, grandparents or friends of those of children, we all want to pass on a love of gardening to the next generation.

And even better if we can help kids learn at the same time.

Hello, I'm Miranda and welcome to this episode. Today I'm inside the garden of forest school teacher Jamie Johnson and joined by two of her children, Rowan and Amalie, aged 4 and 12. I'm here to find out how we can use

gardening to support learning in fun ways. I started by asking her, does she think gardening helps

children's development? Oh, massively. I think, you know, some children just can't access

the curriculum as it is in the classroom. And about half the curriculum is sat at desks doing those

core subjects, maths, English, history, and it's a lot of writing. And some children just aren't

built for that. And I think that some children where in the classroom, they play a certain role

or have certain behaviours that are difficult or deemed as difficult, you get them outside and suddenly they're leaders, their directors of play, they're creative, they're in charge, they've got all of this confidence.

And I see that all of the time. It's quite astounding actually how children are quite different for me outside compared with sort of

their form teacher's experience of perhaps their behaviour indoors. And later on, two of your lovely

children are going to be demonstrating some projects. Do you find it sort of brings them out of their

shell? Is it a different child to the child that sat there doing sort of written homework?

I think it's chance to, particularly with Amalie, who's older, I think it's chance to stop and breathe. There's so many expectations and pressures on them. And I think actually you might see this later. I think, you know, she'll be looking for that kind of reassurance. Am I doing this right? Is this the right way of doing it? because they're just constantly told that they've got to have the right answer or tick the right box.

And I think with something like gardening it is very creative you're outside you can make a mess you can get your hands dirty um so for me that's the main thing it's letting them know they can make mistakes yeah yeah I think that's key isn't it you know we're not looking for perfect gardeners we're looking for getting stuck in aren't we absolutely And you learn that way in gardening that's the way that you learn oh we're all still learning absolutely we'll never be done never be done and one of the key things you think that

helps parents and teachers or guardians anyone that spends time around children what is helpful

for them to know if they want to get kids out gardening so firstly i think I think enthusiasm, and I think particularly in schools, I feel sorry for schools. They haven't got the budget to afford, you know, not all schools can employ a gardening teacher or a school teacher, most can't. So I think you do need teachers that have got that little bit of subject knowledge in the area in gardening and in outdoor education. So I think it's bringing that passion and enthusiasm because you might need to pop into school to water things so that they don't all die over the holidays. So it's having somebody willing to do that and actually allowing schools to pay for people to do that as well. But also I think it's just having a little bit of base knowledge. So things about the seasons, knowing when to sow things, you know, don't sew all of your seeds outside in March because they're all going to die. They're not going to survive the cold. It's things like knowing that with carrots, you want to sprinkle them directly. You're not going to have success, putting them in a pot and the children won't be disappointed. So I think it's just a little bit of base knowledge goes a long way, and then it's exploring together with children. So do you think we're sort of not setting ourselves up for failure if we just start with really easy, easy stuff?

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