- An outdoor classroom to nurture another generation of nature lovers.

For the youngest would-be gardeners, learning in nature and being in nature are pretty much the same thing.

They’ll be whittling sticks, building fairy houses, looking for koura in the stream, climbing up trees and roly polying down the hills. New Forest is run by Hella Coenen, whose background in early childhood learning has seen her adapt a small portion of her family’s 240-acre property into a wonderland where schools and early childhood centres bring their students to search for the magic in the forest, and in the stories and mini-adventures they create along the way.

The world-weary tween who arrives thinking they have seen it all before, inevitably departs at the end of the day, enthusiastic and happy. It’s the connection with nature that does it, Hella will tell you – something she sees as every child’s right to be in the great outdoors, amongst the wildness of the land, and exposed to the elements.

The children respond as children do: they rise to the challenge, find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in tasks that adults might take for granted. In climbing to the top of a hill to see a 360-degree view of the area, by making tools, and sitting around a fire eating a lunch they’ve helped make. It’s all part of a day of exploring, connecting, and seeing the outdoors in a whole new way.

Once most of the day’s adventuring has been done, Hella ends the trip with some storytelling, combining myth-making with nature as she tells tales of flightless birds, of pinecones and mices’ tails. Once a Rudolf Steiner teacher, continuing the school philosophy of oral storytelling rather than reading from books provides her with opportunity to connect completely with her wideeyed and captivated audience.

Oral storytelling is, of course, old school. Before books and paper even, it was a pastime all indigenous cultures embraced as a way of passing history down through the generations.

“Reading from a book, you can start thinking about what you’re going to cook for tea that night but to tell, you have to really look and live into the content, so the children take it in much deeper. They’re totally spellbound but the aim is that because I use props with my stories, natural pinecones and pieces of bark, they start to set up little fairy gardens or little scenes using natural materials, and they start telling stories themselves,” Hella explains.

Hella recalls a family who had been on a weekend walk in the Tararua Forest Park and crossed into their place by mistake. When she was chatting to them, the 7-year-old in the family recognised her from a school trip some time before. Hella recounts the visitors’ comments, “‘Mum,’ he said, ‘this was the best day of the year.’

“His mother turned to me and explained, ‘When he came home that day, he had been talking on and on about how he had just enjoyed the best day of the year.’ And it was here in our forest.”

Helga often observes that it’s the shyest, quietest children in the group who come into their own. Free from the restraints of the formal classroom, and given the space to let their imaginations and legs run wild, they usually do. But irrespective of who they were when they began the day, it always ends with a happy-weary feeling you can only get by leaping, tending and spending time under the shade of trees and plants.

Gardeners already know this: it’s a joy that never fails to surface, no matter how old we get, or how much time we spend outside.

Local kindergarten teacher, Claire Stevens, takes a group of 4-year-olds to the New Forest outdoor classroom every year and agrees it is an amazing experience for the children. She says the sense of achievement the children get from doing things that are challenging or first-time events, pay dividends for building their confidence.

“Just getting out and enjoying nature, learning a bit about the outdoors, getting dirty and playing with the mud, drinking from the stream and cooking damper over the fire. It pushes them a bit further, which is really good for them. They have that sense of accomplishment when they reach that goal that they had set for themselves.”

She adds: “The more they’re exposed to nature, the less they’re scared of it.”

Hella grew up in Holland and spent a lot of time outdoors when she was young, describing her childhood as “quite free range”. She feels living amongst the trees again is a full circle moment and wants to be able to offer New Zealand children a brief glimpse of the childhood that she had.

“I think they will remember, even though it’s a drop in the ocean, a one-day outing. This should be a regular thing for children, to let it really penetrate on a deeper level. I hope later in life, the memories of the day might help make them feel more connected to nature and maybe even inspire them to give back, to feel responsible for the care of the earth.”

Under the growing kahikatea, punga and black maire trees of the New Forest classroom in Masterton, you’ll find children of all ages when school is in session.