The California Botanic Garden in Claremont just opened a new outdoor play space designed to get kids dirty, curious, and genuinely connected to native California plants. Not on a screen. Not in a classroom. Out in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, touching bark and smelling leaves.
The Children’s Woodland sits inside the garden’s 86-acre property at 1500 N. College Avenue, which holds more than 22,000 native plants. This new section is different from the rest of the grounds. Kids can actually touch things here.
There’s a sensory garden where certain plants smell like maple syrup. Hammocks hang beneath live coastal oak trees. Sanded wood chunks sit scattered around so children can drag them together and build their own forts, tunnels, dens, whatever they imagine. Jumping logs. Bubbling rock water fountains. Building materials made from natural sources.
All of it freeform. None of it precious.
“We decided that we wanted the installations to be more sort of freeform and open-ended,” said Lauren Weintraub Stoebel, assistant director of visitor engagement at the California Botanic Garden. “We want kids to find creative ways to be in nature, to discover connections on their own without being too guided.”
That philosophy shows in every decision the horticulture team made. The staff built most of the space using logs and other materials sourced from elsewhere on the property. One of the most popular features, a log tunnel kids can crawl through, came from an old oak that blew down in a windstorm. The team dug it out and shaped it into something a six-year-old can disappear into.
That’s the kind of detail that makes this place feel thought-through rather than thrown together.
Stoebel said watching children actually use the space during its development told the team something they couldn’t have planned for. “It was really inspiring and fascinating to watch the different ways that the kids found to be in this space,” she said. Kids didn’t need instructions. They just went.
The rest of the California Botanic Garden, which focuses on native California plants and habitats, keeps visitors to the paths. Some of those specimens are rare. Fragile. Not for grabbing. The Children’s Woodland operates under entirely different rules. Hands-on is the whole point.
The space is also built to change. Stoebel said the design intentionally shifts with the seasons, so a kid who visits in spring sees something different than one who visits in late summer. The next phase of the installation will add what the team calls a “living structure,” a dome with plants growing all around it. The kind of thing you don’t just look at.
Ashlee Armstrong, director of horticulture at the garden, said the long game here is about more than a fun afternoon. She wants children to leave with something that sticks. “Inspiring kids to want to be in nature and make a connection with nature, so that we do have stewards for our natural environment in the future,” Armstrong said.
Research on children and outdoor learning has consistently found that unstructured time in natural settings builds environmental awareness and reduces stress in kids. The Children’s Woodland leans into that, choosing hammocks and loose logs over interpretive signs and guided trails.
The garden is open Tuesday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., though hours vary throughout the year. Tickets run $15 for adults, $11 for seniors and students, $5 for children ages 3 to 12, and free for kids under 3. Worth checking current hours before you drive out.
Claremont sits at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, and the garden’s foothill setting gives the Children’s Woodland a feel that’s genuinely removed from the city. Live oaks. Shade. The sound of water over rocks.
Not a lot of places like it in Southern California, honestly.
Reporting from LAist first brought attention to the new space and the team behind it.
For families who’ve run out of ideas for spring weekends, or who just want their kids off pavement for a few hours, this is a real option. The garden address is 1500 N. College Avenue in Claremont.