The perfect place for children to engage with plants, the Grunsfeld Children’s Growing Garden is a colorful living classroom with garden beds at just the right level for curious young minds.

Budding gardeners and future scientists learn by doing in the Children’s Growing Garden, where they participate in activities that encourage a sense of wonder about plants, and nurture fruits and vegetables from seed to harvest. It’s an ideal environment for family exploration and for guided programs such as field trips, Camp CBG, and Nature Preschool. Accessible trays enable students who use a wheelchair to engage with the plants directly. Kids can even safely marvel at pollinator activity by observing a beehive behind plexiglass. 

Designed to welcome visitors of all ages with cheerful living walls and a rainbow of plant life, the garden includes fruits and vegetables that are common to household gardens as well as more unusual varieties, so children can see firsthand how edible plants grow in all kinds of ways. Asparagus, cantaloupe, Brussels sprouts, and sweet peppers are interspersed with bright flowering plants from snapdragons to petunias, enhancing the space’s beauty and its multisensory experience. The garden beds even feature edible flowers. 

Here, young learners are immersed in plant life and build their own connections with the natural world. 

The Grunsfeld Children's Growing Garden is made possible through the generosity of Esther Grunsfeld Klatz and Ernest A. Grunsfeld III; the Robert R. McCormick Foundation; the Guild of the Chicago Botanic Garden; and the support of the Public Museum Capital Grants Program, Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Illinois State Museum; Lorraine Ipsen-Stotler; Barbara and Richard Metzler; and the Colonel Stanley R. McNeil Foundation.