Outdoor kindergarten

Cathy Bache, is planning to open Britain's first outdoors nursery, a lottery-funded kindergarten where the children will be taught and entertained in a wood. All day, every day. Whatever the weather.

Ms Bache, 46, has been given £10,000 by the lottery-based Awards for All scheme to help create an open-air nursery for up to 24 children alongside Monimail Tower, a recently restored medieval tower that once formed part of a summer palace used by the ancient bishops of St Andrews.

Monimail, which sits in a sheltered dip in the hills just south of the Firth of Tay, was bought in ruins in 1985 by a group of Edinburgh psychotherapists as a therapeutic retreat. Now owned by a trust, its residents are environmentalists running a "sustainable living" commune. Another donor, who has asked to remain anonymous, has pledged £20,000, the first big sum raised by the Secret Garden's well-connected local parents and supporters.

When the Secret Garden nursery opens next autumn, the children will have none of the games and equipment seen in a normal suburban nursery: plastic see-saws, cushioned vinyl floors and sterilised building blocks. Their curriculum will be devoted to nature walks, rearing chickens, climbing trees, "mud play" and vegetable gardening. Their playground will be the forest, and their shelter a wattle and daub "cob" building with outdoor toilets.

The children Ms Bache cares for are oblivious to the weather, she said, even sub-zero temperatures.

"We've recently had two full days with seven hours of solid rain, and the kids don't bat an eyelid. As soon as it rains heavily here, there's a stream comes down the wee road outside - they build dams on it. They loved it."