Teaching Hong Kong children about gardening inspires book

Sometimes the idea for a book presents itself like a duck to water - very organically. This happened for my latest book, My Garden, My Friend, except in this case like a five-year-old to an old gardener.

For many years my partner and I have installed micro-gardening systems at Hong Kong schools, holding regular workshops in preschools, kindergartens, primary and secondary institutions and at special needs education schools. We constantly enjoy meeting and working with children and young adults of various ages and abilities who show keen interest in gardening.

The beauty of matching youngsters' genuine desires to understand a new study with successful outcomes offers more than the odd benefit or two. As a 12-year-old told us: "Gardening is amazing. I create things that I then can eat."

Gardening is amazing in how tiny seeds transform into splendid, scrumptious-tasting and exotic-looking plants that so excite gardeners.

For children, such new adventure stimulates more innovative exploration and approaches. They discover a fascinating and pleasing subject that adds value to their schoolwork and days. We observe how truly engaged they become, with their noses virtually touching the plants, as they marvel at the latest fruiting tomatoes.

When I asked another very young gardener why her vegetables looked so wonderfully healthy, she said: "I love the seeds first, then I put them in the soil." She told me this while giving me a look as if to say: "Don't you know this?"

As children become more involved in gardening, their confidence grows, like their plants. It's a pleasure to observe how their early clumsy efforts at hands-on work and uncertainty about gardening soon evolves into careful handling of tools and plants and considerable focus on the tasks at hand.