We know that flowers are traditionally brought to cemeteries. As Lupita Figueiredo from Inside Bay Area tells us, they also play an important role in the Latino tradition of Day of the Dead:

A room full of vibrant colors, allegoric masks and supersize paper heads on display near Fruitvale Transit Village tells residents that “El Dia de los Muertos” (Day of the Dead) and its mystical customs have arrived.

On Oct. 21, a group of 29 parents, children and artists created a giant altar to celebrate the Mexican tradition that honors the dead and reveals the power of art to connect families and neighborhoods. They are part of the “100 Families Oakland” project, which also includes members of the African-American and Asian-American communities who share their traditions with residents from other cultures.

Latino families observe Day of the Dead as part of their heritage, said Sonia Manjon, director of the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts in Oakland, one of the multicultural project’s sponsors.

“They are using art as the medium to express their own issues and their cultural identity,” Manjon said.

After covering the walls with animal masks and making agreen pyramid altar, it was time to call for an ancestral blessing. Artists Daniel Camacho and Ernesto Olmos, who are well-versed in pre-Hispanic ceremonies, led the crowd through ritual movements as the sounds of a seashell and the scent of burning copal (sap from the copali tree) filled the area.

“We asked our ancestors to bless not only this altar we created above the surface, but also the altar that supports it in the Mictla or infraworld,” Olmos said after the ceremony.

Participants held big papier-mache heads — which looked like “sugar calaveras” or skulls, only bigger — and put them on the altar’s edges. Orange and yellow “Zempazuchit”— marigold paper flowers — were placed all over.

“These flowers are flowers of death in that they help in the purification of the spirit,” Camacho said.

Aylin Gonzalez, a first grader at Garfield Elementary School, was eager to help. “I put the paper with the glue and the paint,” she said, showing off her mask, which she described as a brown, cute “little monkey” with big eyes and ears.

“I was born in Oakland,” she said, speaking English instead of Spanish, her parents’ first language. Aylin may not fully understand cultural heritage, but she knows “everybody made something different. It is fun.”

Her mother, Rosalba Betancourt, also thought making a Day of the Dead altar was primarily just a fun thing to do. But that was before she got involved.

Born in Aguililla, Michoacan, she was familiar with celebrating Day of the Dead. “Growing up, it was about bringing flowers to the cemetery or participating in a procession or church service every year. It was a serious tradition,” she said.

“Here I have found more colorful celebrations,” said Betancourt, referring to Oakland’s transforming Day of the Dead into a fun festivity.

Being part of “100 Families” has made Day of the Dead more special.

“I’ve been feeling like I am very happy because I get to make an altar,” she said.

Betancourt brought a picture of her mother, who died a year ago. The custom of decorating altars with pictures of departed relatives and friends can spark unexpected emotions.

“I think my mother is saying that her daughter has not forgotten her, that I still have her on my mind,” Betancourt said.

Aylin’s father, Jose Luis Gonzalez, said he is proud to see a growing interest in Mexican festivities.

“People from other cultures are getting interested in ours and that makes one get more interested to participate in cultural projects,” Gonzalez said.

The Day of the Dead is celebrated every Nov. 2 in most Latin American countries. Mexico has some of the richest and most mystical celebrations, centered on the popular belief that once a year people who have died visit their living loved ones.

With migration, this tradition has crossed frontiers. Most California cities celebrate it with exhibits and rituals a few weeks before and after Nov. 2.

“At 100 Families Oakland, we are absolutely delighted to celebrate Latino culture,” said Manjon, who thanked artists Luz Chavez, Gonzalo Hidalgo, Martha Montoya, Ernesto Olmos and Daniel Camacho for sharing their cultural expertise and creative abilities.

The Center for Art and Public Life is sponsoring the “100 Families” community art project, along with F. Noel Perry. Perry funded it after being moved by a Day of the Dead altar at the Oakland Museum in 2003 that memorialized Oakland homicide victims from the previous year.

The Day of the Dead altar is at 1249 Ignacio De La Fuente Ave., formerly known as East 34th Street in Oakland. It will be on exhibit until Nov. 20.

The Washington Post describes a great place for kids to learn about flowers and gain an appreciation for nature.

Enter the new, $5 million Children’s Garden at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Va., and you see something that looks like grandpa’s vegetable patch. Walk on through a wooden tunnel and you find paths that dead-end in arches draped in willows and sized for Munchkins.

“It’s inspired by the way kids used to make forts in the woods,” said Beth Monroe, a spokeswoman for the botanical garden.

Forts in the woods, remember those?

Elaborate, highly designed and high-cost gardens for children are all the rage these days as a way for botanical gardens, such as Lewis Ginter, to draw a larger and younger audience — of parents as well as kids. But in a darker reality, they have also become one of the last places for children to find nature for themselves.

Between over-programmed schedules and an ever-expanding electronic universe, children have been robbed of the simple delights of free, unstructured play in natural areas. Even if young people had the time, argues author and child advocate Richard Louv, society conspires against their exploration of the natural world.

“Many housing tracts, condos and planned communities constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children,” writes Louv (pronounced Loove) in “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.”

Seeking in part to fill that void, the Children’s Garden at Lewis Ginter features a large, turreted tree house overlooking a lake. Here, kids can drop maple seeds and watch them twirl to earth, or see the bluegills swimming at the water’s edge. The ramp to the house is a gentle, snaking journey of 600 feet, designed to allow access to those in wheelchairs and to take kids through a canopy of conifer and deciduous trees without their actually climbing them.

Elsewhere, a water play area allows children to frolic in jets of water. This evokes the idea of playing in a stream, but on a rubberized, scrape-proof surface with water that is clean, filtered and recycled, said executive director Frank Robinson. Nearby, parents get to sit in the shade. Another area allows kids to get dirty gardening and making crafts. An international village features child-size representations of indigenous structures from around the world, along with plots filled with vegetables and herbs distinct to those regions.

Robinson sees an attraction where kids will learn and play, a place where young families will go with their children but also an outdoor classroom for thousands of grade-schoolers from local school districts. (Part of the design includes parking space for school buses and restrooms big enough to accommodate hordes of children.)

Though no elaborate children’s gardens have yet been built in Washington, various botanical institutions have strong children’s educational programs, including Green Spring Gardens Park and the American Horticultural Society’s River Farm, both in Fairfax County, Va.; Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Md.; and the Washington Youth Garden at the National Arboretum, where inner-city school kids raise vegetables.

At schools themselves, teaching gardens, typically of habitat flora, are becoming more common, both in Washington and the suburbs.

In such a setting, nature may be taught rather than simply absorbed and enjoyed, but Louv applauds these efforts anyway. “We don’t have much choice but to structure the unstructured experience in nature,” he said in an interview from his home in San Diego.

A study released earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids age 8 to 18 now spend on average 6.3 hours a day with media, mostly the television, personal computers, video games and music devices. Seventh- to 12th-graders surveyed spent another 53 minutes on the phone.

But the other side of the coin — programmed time for excessive homework, sports and other achievement pursuits — is also robbing children of quiet, unhurried time to contemplate their world or build relationships.

“It goes back to parental anxiety, an almost non-acceptance of the child’s inherent nature and (an attempt) to convert them into some accomplishment machine,” said Alvin Rosenfeld, a child psychiatrist in New York and Greenwich, Conn.

Another hurdle, of course, is the parental anxiety about child stalkers on every corner.

“Part of the reason we built this,” said Robinson, “is because it’s a place where the parents felt it was safe and where the kids could have fun.” A decade in the making, it opened Sept. 24.

Such attractions have sprouted across the country. The Enchanted Woods at Winterthur Museum near Wilmington, Del., opened four years ago as a 3-acre oak forest where children could play with imagined sprites and fairies. And a new and much larger children’s garden will open in early 2007 as part of the rebuilding of the East Conservatory at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa.

Norfolk Botanical Garden is planning to open its 3-acre children’s garden, World of Wonders, next September. Like the new Richmond garden, it will have areas for playing and learning, and for exploring gardening and farming traditions in different cultures. (Indeed, Robinson said one of the aims of the Lewis Ginter attraction is to bring more minority and immigrant families to an institution that has traditionally appealed to affluent whites.)

Ironically, botanical gardens have been historically hostile to young children, who are feared as destructive creatures that run roughshod over planting beds and pluck flowers.

“The whole point of a children’s garden is to do all the things you can’t do in a botanical garden — touch things, smell things, get dirty, get wet, climb through things and make noise,” said Linda Candler, director of development and marketing at the Norfolk garden.

She anticipates that the attraction will increase from the current 220,000 visitors a year by another 50,000. But if these gardens for children and their parents are the new zoos, there’s a major difference.

“When you take your child to the zoo,it’s easy for a parent to say: ‘Here’s an elephant, here’s a tiger.’ But at a botanical garden, they don’t know the plants,” said Ann Parsons, the Norfolk garden’s director of education. The children’s gardens lift that burden.

In an ideal world, perhaps, parents would have enough space, time, knowledge, interest and money to create a home garden where their children could lose themselves and find a connection to the environment. Many do, and Louv thinks it would be great for parents to let their yards get a bit wild and allow their kids to build little elements for the imagination. But, “there’s a fine line between expecting more from parents and burdening parents.”

And Parsons notes that many children who visit the Norfolk garden live in apartments.

The children’s garden phenomenon may have a short-term need to draw in kids and their parents, but there is a long-term interest at play, too, said Robinson.

“If these children don’t understand that these plants sustain us, who’s going to take care of our food?” he said. “Who’s going to be worried about preservation of land or species, or understanding the cycles of nature and the impact they have on us?”

Henry Homeyer in Notes from the Garden has some great advice for getting your flower garden ready for the winter:

Let’s face it: Summer is over.

I try to ignore the reality of shortening days and the chilly nights. On sunny days, I get out in the garden to pull weeds or plant some new perennials or bulbs, and pretend that the fine weather will last. But it won’t. Winter is on the way, and we’d better get our gardens cleaned up and ready for it. Here’s what I suggest:

First, get rid of any diseased plants or any plants that are susceptible to insects or diseases. If you’ve had problems with pests on a plant, cut down the stalks and put them in a burn pile or in the trash that goes to the dump. I do that with the carcasses of tomatoes, potatoes and squash-family plants. All are sometimes prone to one malady or another. If your phlox was moldy, cut it down and get rid of the stalks now, not in the spring. Growing good apples is tough for organic gardeners, but cleaning up the drops in the autumn helps to minimize pest problems, especially apple scab.

Next, there are the weeds. I know, I know, you’re tired of weeding. The quick solution is to rototill the garden. It will make the weeds and their seeds seem to disappear, and everything will look great. But that’s like sweeping a rotten banana under the bed and wondering where the fruit flies come from. It doesn’t solve the problem. Pull the weeds or cut off the tops with the seeds before rototilling.

The lazy boy’s solution is a flamethrower. I have one, and it’s great for eliminating seeds. They’re actually called flame-weeders, and they make quick work of weeds and their seeds. Mine consists of a 10-foot-long rubber hose connected at one end to a propane tank used with a gas grill, and on the other to a 3-foot metal wand with a torch at the tip. Light it up, and it sends out a 2-foot blue flame. If you get one, be sure to have a hose present and the water turned on when you use it. Don’t try this on a windy day. Doing it in a light rain is good, in fact. Flame-weeders are available from Fedco Seeds (www.fedcoseeds.com or 1-207-873-7333) for $75, not including the propane tank.

Flame-weeders won’t get rid of perennial weeds and grasses, however. Those need to be pulled, or they’ll be back. Dandelions, thistles, burdock and all those troublesome creeping grasses will be back if you don’t pull them. Rototilling, of course, just chops them up, and each piece may develop into a new plant next spring. Not sure what’s a perennial weed? One that has a tap root or is tough to pull out is probably a perennial. Annual weeds tend to throw lots of seeds, but have smaller, less extensive root systems.

Gardeners differ considerably in their views on fall cleanup of flowerbeds. Some want to cut everything to the ground, others let it all die and rot, planning to rake it up in the spring. I fall somewhere in the middle. I always mean to tidy up everything, but often don’t get to it all. So I prioritize, first cleaning up beds most visible from the road (to fool the neighbors into thinking I’m a diligent gardener). I like to leave flowers with stiff stems to stand up above the snow and anything with seeds that birds might enjoy.

Given the extent of our flower gardens, I’ve had to learn tricks to make fall cleanup easier. One of the fastest ways to cut down plants is with electric hedge trimmers. I have an inexpensive one made by Black & Decker called the Hedgehog. I plug it into a long cord and have at it. I always plug it into a ground fault outlet – one of those with the reset button that keeps you from electrocuting yourself if you inadvertently cut off the cord. It requires a lot of bending over, but it’s lightweight and just right for the job.

Another quick way to cut down perennials is with a sharp knife. Grab a handful of stems, slice and toss into a waiting wheelbarrow. I have a serrated “root knife” I bought from Lee Valley Tools (www.leevalley.com or 1-800-871-8158) for around $10 that works well, though any sharp knife works just fine, too. Using a sharp knife is a lot easier on the hands than using scissors or pruners – and faster, too.

My last fall chore is always to spread a good thick layer of chopped leaves and grass clippings over the vegetable garden. Leaves are a wonderful source of organic matter, and the earthworms love them. I run them over with the lawnmower to hasten the breakdown process. After the first rain, they don’t blow around much. This also helps keep heavy rains from washing away soil.

As pretty as the fall colors are, fall is still a melancholy time for me. Winter is on the way, and I’ll miss working in the garden – and the joy of picking a flower or a tomato. On the other hand, it’ll be good to have more time in my easy chair, and I might even get caught up on all those gardening magazines that have been accumulating.