EUGENE–A band of University of Oregon students ripped out the playground at a campus day care center last week. Don’t worry, the students aren’t vandals–the playground had to come down in order to build an innovative play area dubbed "the big backyard."

By next week, children at the Spencer View Co-op Family Center will have their own creek bed to dam up, a couple of "quarries" for digging and a ground-level tree house made of living willow trees. The older kids, aged two to seven years, will be able to ride their bikes over a couple of kid-size hills and explore a "geology wall" made of intriguing rocks. Younger children will be able to crawl through a man-made tunnel and wander around in a "scent garden" filled with plants and shrubs the kids can touch and smell.

The UO students, a half dozen future landscape architects, are getting some hands-on experience that will teach them unforgettable lessons about the difficulty of turning creative plans into mud and rock realities.

"Children are really harsh on landscapes," says Beth Reynolds, a landscape architecture student enrolled in the studio who also works on a grounds crew at the UO. "It was a real challenge to find plants and shrubs that are hardy enough to stand up to kids at play."

Selecting plants wasn’t the only challenge these students faced.

"Educators at the Spencer View Co-op wanted a play area where the kids would design their own playtime–not one where the equipment would dictate how they play. They asked for a design where the surrounding environment would be a teaching tool," says Project Director Stan Jones, a UO landscape architecture professor. After interviewing all the users–from the kids themselves to their parents and teachers–it became clear to the UO students that what kids really like to do is play in the water, dig in the dirt and climb hills.

All of those activities had to be squeezed into 3,000 square feet of play area. And to ratchet up the challenges a bit, they had to finish the project winter term and keep costs within a $10,000 budget.

How successful have they been?

"We can hardly wait," says four-year-old Jordan, who really likes to climb on rocks.

The project was funded through a $10,000 grant from the Meyer Trust. Local merchants also are donating building materials, and the UO’s Facilities Services division is lending a hand–and the occasional jack hammer–to the project.

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