Wanderwood Gardens
Deneen Powell Atelier, Inc. (DPA) designed Wanderwood Gardens as an immersive “winding woodland” experience—a natural environment where children can explore, imagine, engage in appropriate physical risks, and develop a lasting connection to nature, while creating an experience uniquely rooted in the ecology, landscape, and history of the Driftless Zone. Wanderwood Gardens is a living landscape where physical activity, environmental education, imaginative play, and family experiences will occur together. Most importantly, this Garden was designed in response to a growing concern about the deleterious effects of children’s increasing exposure to electronic media and decreased opportunities for outdoor play.
Wanderwood provides a place for children to test their balance, strength, coordination, creativity, and confidence while developing teamwork and social skills. At the same time, the Garden’s wooded setting, limestone features, native plantings, and immersive learning opportunities introduce children and families to flora, fauna, geology, and cultural heritage of the region. The underlying philosophy of environmental stewardship begins with a deep connection to a particular place. Wanderwood Gardens allows children to experience nature as something exciting, beautiful, and awe inspiring, and seeks to establish an enduring connection between play and stewardship.
The Play Patch
The southern section of the garden is tot focused, with storytelling spaces, small-scale climbers, and low log climbers in a potting shed-themed area. An endemic Pleistocene ice-age relic snail found only in the area is the inspiration for the tot water play area, where a floating granite ball is the snail’s shell and its slime trail is a shallow splash stream leading to a paint-with-water on a leaf-shaped black slate wall. Plantings transition from the showy ornamentals of the adjacent Arboretum to the native woodlands to the north.
Music
Dendy Village
Dendy Village is a collection of tiny houses for discovery and make-believe opportunities, with doors and windows sized for the little ones, while interiors are tall and comfortable for mom and dad.
Mine Camp
Dubuque’s local history is steeped in lead mines, which Wanderwood Gardens embraces with an exploratory mine camp. Children can build balsa forts that expand mine structures, explore the mine tunnel, dig for found treasures, fill mine carts, and climb to the top of the mine camp hill using ropes and lugs. A BMX-style running track with banked turns encourages a scamper through the trees, while a snake-shaped path curves through an allée of firs that remain from the Christmas tree farm, leading to quiet areas at each end.
The Canopy
Taking full advantage of a sloping site, the accessible treehouse decks lead to a large, elevated net end at a rope vee bridge, tempting young explorers out to a crow’s nest 16-feet above the forest floor. Multiple points of entry, including log climbers, log round steps, a net tunnel, and spiral staircase provide children numerous choices. Up, down, and around—the area offers every way to play outdoors in the trees.
Wandering Waters
A water play area with a splash stream, jumping jets, a fog bank, and a water wall.
Finishing Touches
Community Stewardship and Social Responsibility
The Owners gifted this immersive environmental education and children’s play-in-the-woods asset to the Dubuque community.
Immensely involved in developing brain health facilities and legislation in the local community and State, the Owners recognized how play in nature would provide the ultimate sensory experience for children, improving their behavioral and social skills as well as physical acumen.