Originally designed in collaboration with children and with a focus on nature-based play, The Ian Potter Foundation Children’s Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne has been an inspiration for anyone involved in botanic gardens, design, plants, and nature-based learning since it opened in 2004. For its 20th anniversary in 2024, a generous donation facilitated a much-needed spruce-up for the Children’s Garden, with infrastructure and garden improvements and a refresh of the storytelling, interpretation and wayfinding.

But how do you respectfully build upon something so successful and dearly loved, whilst being innovative and contemporary? How could we stay true to the child-led process behind the Children’s Garden’s design, and create storytelling and experiences that are as treasured as the garden itself? Critically, how could we ensure that children are heard, included, and see themselves in the places they treasure and adore, whilst ensuring the outcomes are truly great? This presentation is a case study of creating refreshed storytelling and interpretation for The Ian Potter Foundation Children’s Garden, a collaboration between children, designers, artists and RBGV staff. We’ll share the challenges of navigating the legacy of the Children’s Garden, and reveal how its child-led design ethos, RBGV’s Interpretation and Storytelling Framework and research with children, grown-ups, designers, volunteers and the RBGV team helped guide our approach. We’ll share how this resulted in layered interpretive experiences, including playfully designed and written signage, children’s artwork on plant labels and a child-led audio experience for grown-ups.