Nature Deficit Disorder?

I remember blogging about Nature Deficit Disorder in my Adventuring Maya blog here and Richard Louv's book 'Last child in the woods.' Well, fast forward a year and a half and now I feel sure that not only are my children suffering from this, but their mama is too. We are living in - I must confess - a green, leafy and pleasant corner of London. However, I don't come into enough contact with open space. None of us do in our family, and I know that when I tell my kids we're heading for a park (ie parkland) and they ask where the swings are, it should hardly come as a surprise.

It is really, really important to me that my children grow up with a love of nature and the natural world, but how can I expect this if we stay ensconced in the suburbs of London? And as for me, this is what I need as regularly as I can to be creative, to feel alive, to be energised:
I need to stand in a space and close my eyes and hear birdsong, not just the rush of cars.
I need to be able to look up and see a canopy of leaves and wide open sky, not just tall buildings.
And I need to feel grass and earth and sand under my feet.

These needs often feel physical, starting as a dull throb and building up to a tightening around the chest. When I think about how much time I spent as a child in fields, letting my imagination run free, sometimes alone, sometimes with others and sometimes with a book, I occasionally feel gripped with a guilt of sorts that my own children don't have that same opportunity here in London. I am certain that these countless hours spent in nature helped to stoke my creativity. But I know that it is pointless and unhelpful feeling bad just because for my children, a 'park' contains swings and slides and a roundabout. We are urban dwellers right now, what can I expect? I need to just take every opportunity that presents itself to explore nature with my children, whether it takes the form of the allotment, a walk along the river or pointing out all the signs of spring as we walk to school. Because it is here, all around us, even in London. In the words of Rahima Baldwin who wrote a book called 'You are your child's first teacher', 'Nature is all around us, even in the city. If you can't exercise your powers of observation on a Sunday walk in the local park, you won't experience anything by the sea or in the mountains.' So maybe it's time for me to start appreciating what we have here, right under our noses.