3. Fromme Design led a team of Garden leadership and Siteworks Studios to generate a dynamic new heart for the existing children’s garden based on the theme of books hidden within a ruined library. The Dripping Doorway, Rotunda, and Verdant Valley offer multiple ways for children to play with water and encounter plants. The Grove encloses the three spaces with a perimeter hedge and small flowering trees.

A curtain of droplets under the Dripping Doorway is the first opportunity to frolic at the Rotunda’s grand entrance. An adjacent path allows adults to remain dry. Eight pairs of classical columns ring the core space and randomly spout over visitor’ heads into the central Water Table, an elevated surface for manipulating water.

Children explore a series of rooms and discover interactive water features. The Map Room contains slate atlases on which children may plot their own journeys and chart fantastical geographies with water from a dripping globe. Tilting special books causes them to “spit” whimsically at visitors in the Spilling Spines alcove. Water emerges in diverse manners from open pages of text in the Liquid Literature reading room.

Architecture dissolves into overgrown ruins along the Rill, a rippling channel winding through a rocky valley. Cascading and pendulous trees and shrubs grow overhead, creating the shade dappled Verdant Valley. Pushing deeper into the landscape, children encounter the Gushing Grotto, the bubbling source of the Rill.