From the Garden: Summer Nature Crafts

Growing Up Nordic

May 8

3 min read

Updated: Jun 25

Everything You Need Is Already Outside

Hands arranging pressed purple flowers on an open book, surrounded by ferns. Warm light, rustic wooden table, creating a calm, vintage mood. — Flower pressing

The best summer crafts tend to begin by accident. A child goes outside and comes back with their hands full. A few petals, a stone with a good weight to it, a stick that looked like it might be useful for something. The materials are always there in the garden and along the path, and most of the time the only thing standing between a child and a morning's craft is somebody slow enough to notice what they brought in.

Here are seven things to make from what is already outside. None of them need a kit or a trip to the craft shop, they ask for hands, a bit of time, and whatever the season has left lying on the ground.

1. Grass Weaving

Pull a few long blades of grass and weave them between your fingers, over and under and over again, until they start to hold together. It helps to begin with two blades and add more once the rhythm is there. After a while you have a small green mat, or something loose enough to wrap into a bracelet. Leave it out overnight and it dries into a curl, so that by the next afternoon it has turned into its own small object.

Child holding green and dry grass in hands, wearing a beige shirt. The background is blurred, creating a focus on concentration and curiosity. — Grass weaving

2. Flower and Leaf Pressing

Choose flat flowers and leaves with shapes worth keeping, a single buttercup or a fern frond or anything with a good edge to it. Lay them between two sheets of paper, slide the whole thing inside the heaviest book in the house, and then put it somewhere you will forget about it for a week. The pressing happens on its own while you get on with other things. A buttercup picked in July can become a Christmas card in December, which is a fair return on a few minutes spent in the garden.

Hands arrange pressed flowers in an open journal on a rustic wooden table. Ferns and yellow blossoms on creamy pages. Calm, creative mood. — *Pressed petals*

3. Stone Stacking

Gather smooth, flat stones in a range of sizes and find a level patch of ground to build on. Set the largest at the bottom and work upward, adjusting as you go, which takes more patience than it does skill. The tower usually falls, often just as the last stone goes on, and that is half the reason to do it. So you build it again. When it finally holds, leave it standing in the garden for whoever comes past next to find.

4. Mud Painting

Mix garden soil with water a little at a time until the paste is thick enough to stay where you put it. Work it with fingers or a stick, or an old paintbrush if one turns up. The best surfaces are smooth stones, a patch of pale bark, or a plank of fence. Half the pleasure is in the contrast, the way dark mud looks dragged across pale wood, or the chalkier soil shows up on a dark stone. Rain washes it all off within a day, so it is the kind of painting that leaves nothing to clear up.

5. Petal Colour Sorting

Collect fallen petals, small leaves, seed cases, anything with a bit of colour and a shape worth a second look. Spread it all out on a white cloth or a sheet of plain paper and start sorting, by colour to begin with and then by shade within each colour, working from the palest to the darkest. It takes longer than you would think and holds a child's attention in a way that is hard to plan for. The sorting is the whole activity, and nothing has to be made from it afterwards.

6. Stick and Leaf Mobile

Find a fairly straight stick about the length of your forearm, ideally with a bit of weight to it. Tie three or four lengths of string along it at uneven spacings and hang things from the ends, a flat leaf, a dried seed head, a small pinecone, whatever came home in pockets. Hang the mobile from a low branch or wedge it into a doorframe and leave it to turn in whatever air moves through. The unevenness is what makes it worth looking at.

7. Nature Mandala

Find a flat patch of bare ground and put a single object in the centre, a stone or an acorn, anything with a clear shape. Build outward from it in rings, petals first, then leaves, then small twigs around the edge. The building keeps shifting as it grows, so the ring that looked finished a moment ago starts to look wrong once the next one goes down. The mandala lasts an afternoon before the wind or a passing dog undoes it, and that is rather the point of it. Part of our guide to a Nordic summer.