The Child’s Garden only opened a year ago the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, after at least 2 years of development. It is hard to imagine a more whimsical place. White bordered yards with cat picket fences, grass roofed Victorian sheds, tall hollyhocks and red roses, giant sunflowers, old fashioned water pumps, a windmill, a pond with the boats from Wind in the Willows and a life sized brass statue of the bear from Blueberries for Sal, William Carlos William’s Red Wheelbarrow (an actual red wheelbarrow with the poem on the side), a tiny bog with carnivorous plants, a tree house and a wigwam, a bear cave, a windmill, Farmer Macgregor’s vegetable patch and the first annual gourd Olympics. And that is without mentioning the Gnome Shed with its rounded door and a roof of blueberry plants. Whimsy, pure and simple.

Like most attempts at whimsy, this is a very adult production. The attention to detail, the hyper-inventiveness, the elaboration is very unchildlike. It is not simple, not innocent, but very calculated…calculated to appeal to a child.

It certainly appeals to the child in me. I love it! I appreciate the whimsy and admire the inventiveness. I have no real idea, though, how a child would see it. If the children in attendance on a Friday in July were any evidence, then it certainly has at least a quiet appeal…but then I suspect that the children in attendance were already a select group…as in the children of parents who would appreciate a day at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden and expect their children will enjoy it too. Children who have been read Wind in the Willows and Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, and Blueberries for Sal. Children with lovingly fed imaginations. Rare children, I suspect, these days. Then too, it is hard to say how much of the children’s enjoyment of this truly magical place is a simple reflection of the obvious joy their parents take in it.

Ah…but it does not really matter, in the end. Certainly part of our love of whimsy is spiritual, and was succulently captured by Jesus when he told us that it is the children, and those who have (as we say it today) maintained their inner child, who will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Not a childish faith, but a childlike faith is what we all need. And adult whimsy is certainly one of the best approaches to that inner child, and to that faith.

The whimsical Children’s Garden at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden succeeds, largely, because its creators believed that if they could touch the inner child in themselves, then true children would enjoy it. And that is indeed a childlike faith, and that puts the Children’s Garden half way to heaven as far as I am concerned.

Happy Sunday.