In-Town Tourist: Inniswood Metro Park
“This is one of the regular parks?” My daughter Hannah knows most of our area parks for their running trails and frisbee golf courses. While we’ve wandered through Inniswood Metro Park many times, this was the first time my daughter had noticed metro on the entrance sign.
Most of our area parks here in central Ohio are geared to recreational activity: hiking, running, biking, birdwatching, fishing and canoeing or kayaking. Inniswood by contrast, sprawls with cultivated gardens, lush expanses of lawn and woods, and contains kid-friendly creative content such as a “secret garden”, a farm (with a watering trough to splash around in) and a tree house playground. I always support our park funding at election time, and Inniswood is an inspiring example of tax dollars well spent.
A favored local destination, Inniswood’s nooks and niches have been the focus of many an afternoon’s exploration for us. A few years ago my youngest son and I found some thrills catching and releasing frogs in one of the Inniswood ponds (until management posted a sign expressly forbidding the activity, oops…). The secret garden, a quiet stone ruins splayed by twining vines and embedded with jeweled marbles, elicits both romance and mystery. A story walk maze draws visitors from sentence to sentence, tile to tile, reading and walking to the legend’s end: a statue depiction of the story’s main characters. The tree house playground includes an elevated walkway with swaying bridges and, of course, a tree house for children and very small(!) adults to explore.
Always familiar but ever changing from one season’s colors into the next, Inniswood Metro Park is a year round festival of nature. There’s nothing regular about it at all.
Coming up: Kid friendly fun at Inniswood, Drifting down the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, Boston, Frank Lloyd Wright designs in Ohio…
