Sensory Garden

Your typical garden is designed for one, maybe two senses: flower gardens are beautiful to look at and, if you’re lucky, add a bit of sweetness to the air. A vegetable garden may be focused entirely on taste, a lumpy bit of tumbling ugliness, rooted in practicality on its way to your table.

How would you design a garden if you were thinking about your senses at once? Bright colors and subtle shadings, fierce and delicate smells, lavender and mint and honey suckle and humusy underfill? Soft lambs ear to brush your cheek on, long, tickling sharp strands of grass and cattail poking for your attention, pliant mosses to lay down on? How would you create that sense of sudden stillness you get when you enter a thick grove or a cave, or the clean, wet scent of spring after a lightning storm? How would you design a garden that could be enjoyed by the blind?

If these questions sound like fun ones to answer, you may want to head over to the Woodland Park Zoo Educational Resource Center this Wednesday, September 29th from 6:30 – 8:30 pm for the first of three public meetings for a planned sensory garden at the Woodland Park Zoo (to be located near the existing Rose Garden).

The project has been approved by the Seattle Parks Department and has a grant from the Department of Neighborhoods to complete a conceptual design, now they need your input on what that design should be.

Want more information? Contact the aptly named Briar Rose Bates for the skinny.

(Photo by Aurelio Aisiain)