Coming soon: Midland's natural place to'park'

RECREATION

Posted By CHRISTINA BERNARDO

Posted 6 months ago

Midland will soon have it's very first natural playground later this year.

The Bienenstock Natural Playground will be located on Griffin Street in the new subdivision.

The developer of the subdivision has allocated a certain percentage for property to the town to develop a playground.

"One of the gentlemen, who is part owner -they're based out of Burlington -he approached us (and asked) if we would be interested (in a natural playground, )" said Dave Hamelin, Midland parks and harbour manager.

"They're in the planning stages of doing the actual design. We'll look at it and then make any changes from there" he said. "It'd be an ongoing thing, but the playground itself, we hope to get that done before fall. Then there's still tree and flower planting (to be done) later."

A natural playground is designed to bring children back to nature while remaining safe using fallen logs, tree stumps for seating, vertical logs for forts, slides embedded in the side of hills, etc.

Bienenstock Natural Playgrounds, based out of Hamilton, are built by Gardens for Living, a design and build playground company.

The town will pay for the approximately 50 metre by 50 metre playground, however the cost is not determine until the plans are final.

"We see this as a neighbourhood park," said Bryan Peter, director of parks and recreation.

The park will feature a toboggan hill, sand and slide feature, seating areas as well as a series of wacky posts -"they're like a tree limb that's out of the ground and the kids can bang on it or run around or whatever," Hamelin explained.

Peter said it's the town's experiment. "We certainly hope it will be very successful. If it's as successful as we hope and expect, we'll look at other park areas," Peter concluded.

For more on Bienenstock Natural Playgrounds, check out www.naturalplaygrounds.ca.