Sticks & Stones by Lu – La Studio

Nestled in a woodland at the edge of the sea, Sticks and Stones is a site-specific nature play experience that invites visitors to discover its secret spaces and precious materials. Tall oak, maple, and pine provide canopy over a soft forest floor, while mature laurels meander the path and define the playrooms. The garden offers a series of landscape follies- boulder field, riverbed, and tangles of fallen trees- setting a stage for exploration and open-ended play.

With a nod to the sea, the site engages its materiality in a loose narrative of local geological history. Weathered boulders, rounded river stone, and angular granite mingle with cast sea fossils and exploded geodes. Knotty, burled wood tangles together, while stumps and logs are cast about creating bridges and passageways. The ground is a shifting plane of leafy brown forest floor, wood mulch, pea gravel, and shells.

The site of the play garden was formerly a memorial remembering a young child that included a long bridge flanked by laurels leading to a playful sculpture of a train. The project brief was to transform this memorial into an active playspace. The design dissolves the strict centerline of the shrubs by weaving an accessible stone dust path through eleven giant laurels that transect the site from top to bottom. The addition of a textural streambed further offsets this axis by creating a new center of the garden, widening its edge to include a stand of mature hemlocks.

The narrative exploits the existing vegetation for its age and scale but more for its personality. Beneath the mature trees and shrubs, we tuck in hardy plants with a distinctly prehistoric vibe. Large-leafed mayapples, craggy sweet fern, and the soft fronds of amsonia are planted in a resilient matrix of woodruff and waldsteinia. Pink burnets tumble the rock wall, and Pennsylvania sedge softens its edges, while Sumacs pop up in the clearings of the understory. We are not interested in the space feeling tidy. Plants creep out of their beds onto the edges of the stream and peek out from under the boulders.

While the materials are traditional to ‘natural playgrounds’, the design arranges these elements to take advantage of the site, giving coherence to the space as a complete landscape rather than a series of play activities. Unlike ready-made playgrounds that collapse narrative and spatial experience into a single object, this garden playground distributes narrative cues throughout the site.

The follies at Sticks and Stones double as play destinations. A Streambed, Boulderfield, Lookout, Fossil Steppers, and Tangle of Fallen Trees welcome a range of play opportunities for multiple ages. Connected by formal and informal paths these follies invite a circuit of exploration and open-ended play.

The design takes advantage of a six-foot grade change from top to bottom of the site. A dry streambed joins an existing drainage channel and follows the forest edge. We highlight its textural qualities, roughing the edges, popping boulders, and large stepping stones to create an interior path interrupted by half-sawn log bridges.

The streambed is populated with twelve varieties of cast sea fossils engaging a narrative of prehistory while inviting a game of seek. With the sea a short walk away, the fossils broaden the sense of place while playing with the artifice of time. The fossil steppers expand the narrative game by linking sense experience with motion in an open-ended hop, skip, and jump over a bed of pea stone and shells.

Boulders edge and anchor the garden. They band together behind the laurels, under the oaks, in a field of open-ended play. In the center of the garden at the mouth of the river, a geode lined with crystals offers the secrets of heat, water, and air over time.

Woven into a grove of existing oaks, a tangle of trees stacked into a custom climber invites children to a hammock beneath a leafy canopy. The textural logs are angled to provide opportunities for multiple ages and skill levels. Built with on-site felled wood, this carbon zero, site-specific play structure integrates a series of long bridges and playful steppers that link to the larger play circuit.

The lookout lined at the back with a boulder retaining wall offers a quiet refuge in the garden. The fort is a simple construction of split logs set in a semi-spiraled circle, interrupted by a scramble of boulders.

Evoking the tradition of narrative gardens, we celebrate a local geological story of advance and retreat, erosion and deposition. That one can read the history of Cape Cod by a stone is at the core of this garden

Sticks & Stones offers an open ended, playful story of a place. Without a definitive take away, it asks us to find more, to look closer, deeper and wider – to study a stone, to enter the woods. In a time where there is a great need for curiosity and connection, gardens are a portal to the pleasures and mysteries of the natural world.

• Project typology:

playground

• All landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape:

Lu – La Studio