A Child’s Video Tour of Her Family’s Garden

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

An enduring question these days is how to engage children with nature given how much time they spend looking at screens of one size or another.  I’ve written off and on about the merits of hybrid experience, …

…in which children and young adults get out in the wet, wriggling, fluttering world — whether a wilderness or Thoreau’s “swamp on the edge of town” — and then use the Web for that deeply human practice of communicating the things that catch our attention.

Here’s a fresh example, a tour of the early-spring sights in a Bryn Mawr, Pa., backyard garden by Eden Jane McCloskey, age five:

The video came my way via Eden’s mom, Jenny Parker McCloskey, a Twitter acquaintance. In an e-mail exchange, McCloskey described the genesis of the video this way:

Yesterday I handed my iPhone to my five-year-old to play with while I prepped dinner. Much to my surprise, she created her own nature documentary of our back yard. (I assumed she was playing Angry Birds!)
Of course, the first thing I thought of was your post on this very topic.
I felt bad about using the iPhone to get her to leave me alone for a few minutes. I don’t anymore.

My favorite moments are Eden’s discussion of “prickly flowers” (roses) and this description:

These are berries that birds eat. They’re poisonous for humans but not poisonous for birds.

Go, Eden!