By Amy Campion
Bedtime is often a tender and intimate time of day, especially for children. For some it’s all cosy pyjamas and stories, but for others it’s when worries creep in as the lights go out. Peninsula children’s author Christine Coleman understands this experience well, and her new picture book Your Special Garden: Sleep Tight is all about giving children a safe inner place to sleep.
The book invites children to close their eyes and step into a ‘special garden’ they create using their imagination, a magical place filled with whatever makes them feel calm and happy. Children may picture flowers and fairies, their favourite toy talking to them or, in the case of Christine’s 10-year-old grandson, dinosaurs roaming among the trees. The only rule is that no one can enter unless they are invited.
For Christine, this book is more than a sweet idea for a bedtime story; she describes it as a very practical tool. A long-time educator, she’s always been drawn to understanding her own inner world and how people keep going when life is challenging. Decades ago, a meditation course lit a spark for her: guided visualisation, she realised, could genuinely help people feel less overwhelmed. Since then, she has used her own version of the special garden with herself, her children, and now her grandchildren.
The Your Special Garden series grew from that dedicated practice. Alongside Sleep Tight, there are now two companion books. In Grief and Loss, children are gently invited to meet and talk with a loved one, a pet, or even a beloved toy they’ve lost as a way of honouring that bond and easing some of the ache. In Aloneness and Anxiety, the garden is a place to practise talking about feelings. Children might imagine walking along the beach or sitting under a tree and having a chat with a special person in their garden. This helps build the sense that “there is always someone who will listen”, and importantly, develops their real-world skill of naming what’s going on inside.
Written primarily for ages 2–12, the books are designed so that parents, grandparents, and carers can pick them up and use them straight away. The text offers suggestions such as where you might go, who you might meet, and how you might move around your garden, but the real magic is that the child feels safe.
To help adults put these ideas into practice, Christine also runs Your Special Garden workshops showing parents how to guide their children into their own inner garden. It’s the same approach that she’s used at home, including with a granddaughter who drifts off more easily knowing that Grandma will there to “meet her in the garden”.
Christine’s special garden helps anyone understand there is always a safe place to come back to, and you can carry it with you wherever you go. Your Special Garden: Sleep Tight and its companion titles are available online from major booksellers as well as at austinmacauley.com
