Designing A Sensory Garden

Designing a Sensory Garden is to encourage users to explore, touch, pick, smell and crush plants and interact with objects. A successful sensory garden is designed to engage visitors’ senses of sight, smell, touch, sound, and taste.  This places challenges on the design, particularly a need to make things robust and to choose plants and materials that can tolerate the inevitable damage from inquisitive hands.

These sensory types of gardens are popular and beneficial to both children and adults, especially those who have sensory processing issues, including autism and other disabilities. To get the maximum use from a sensory garden, it is important to take into account for whom the garden is primarily intended. It is also important to understand what plants and features will best achieve the atmosphere that is desired.

Include Sensory Experiences

We all use our senses when enjoying a garden, whether intentionally or not. We can’t help but admire a particularly vivid bloom or enjoy the sound of a pollinator as it travels from flower to flower. The difference with a sensory garden is that there is a conscious effort to appeal to all five senses.

An essential aspect of the design is thinking about what range of experiences will be available in the garden. People must be able to get around and so the routes must be accessible, but it’s important to think about how these journeys can be made interesting and varied. For example using different textured path surfaces, creating areas of shade, and avoiding straight, uniform routes.

Successful design relies on imaginative use of materials and opportunities. Consider ways of concentrating or ‘stage managing’ natural events, for example by introducing nest boxes and feeders so that birds can be observed or choosing nectar-rich plants to encourage butterflies and other pollinators.

Involving artwork or sculptures will add other creative elements and can help provide all-season sensory experiences.  Water points give the option for introducing water features, fountains or water play. Electricity points are useful for adding lighting, music, and other interesting features.

Touch 

If we were to pick the most important sense for exploring a sensory garden this would be the one.  It is often only when we explore with our hands that we get to appreciate the real nature of things – how exquisitely soft the leaf is, how surprisingly heavy the fruit, how dry the moss despite how soft it looks. For all garden explorers the opportunity to touch as much of the garden as possible is important for a fulfilling and memorable experience.

Pattern and Shape 

Patterns can provide fascinating effects and can inspire art work. Regular patterns can be provided by things like brick work, paving, fencing,  and pine cones. More complex patterns from many natural materials such as interesting tree bark and variegated leaves.

Including objects of different shapes is especially useful for a sensory garden intended to aid learning. For a collection of simple, distinctive shapes consider leaves (sycamore, beech, ash), fruits (apples, currants, rose hips), flowers (daisy, giant onion, bell flowers), stems (bamboo canes, dead nettle, grass), paving (hexagons, squares, triangles) and plant containers (round, square, cubic, rectangular) of different heights.

Color 

Plants and other materials offer a complete spectrum of color with the added delight of changes throughout the different seasons. Include flowers, leaves, bark, berries, lichens, mosses, path and wall surfaces and artwork in your plans to create interesting color effects through the year.

Vertical Gardening features add an intriguing dimension to a sensory garden and forces you to look up, not just down. It’s also helpful to make the most of small spaces. Consider using succulents for color, texture, easy care and a conversation piece!

Sound 

Organizers of nature studies often find listening activities to be a good way of calming people and tuning them in to their environment. Children often need to be encouraged to listen to sounds, especially to more subtle ones.

Consider both sounds that occur naturally and those that can be activated by people. Natural sounds include: leaves rustling in the wind, birds singing, insect humming, plus water trickling/dripping/splashing on various surfaces.

Activated sounds include; splashing water, striking chimes and sound sculptures. Deaf people will be able to sense vibrations and percussive sounds and these can be provided through sculpture and features such as tapping waterfall features. “Sound fences”, activated by dragging a stick along a series of lengths of tubing or piping can be melodious and fun.

Smell 

With plants, consider different types of scent: scents that fill the air and can be smelt without touching the plant (such as mock orange (Philadelphus), many roses, winter honeysuckle, curry plant, cut grass, hay); Intimate scents where the flowers need to be investigated (violet, primrose, some Narcissus); Activated scents which are released when plant parts are crushed (most culinary herbs, scented geranium).

Another option is for people to try to identify the scents from different distinctive herbs, such as peppermint and apple mint, lemon thyme, basil and curry plant.

Taste 

Taste can be a useful way of demonstrating where food comes from and showing the link between growing and eating. However, particularly with children, it is important to ensure that they remain cautious about unidentified plants. Compromises may be to restrict the choice to those food plants that are clearly recognized, such as apples, or ones that are grown in specific areas such as a herb bed.

• Sight: Use a variety of colors, textures, and shapes in your plants and hardscape elements. Consider light and shadow, and perhaps a water feature for reflections.
• Smell: Incorporate fragrant plants like lavender, herbs, or flowers. Consider placing them near pathways or seating areas.
• Sound: Include elements that create sound, such as ornamental grasses that rustle in the breeze, wind chimes, or a water feature. Encourage birds and other wildlife by providing feeders and/or a birdbath.
• Touch: Choose plants with different textures, like soft Lamb’s ear or fuzzy Celosia. Consider varying pathway materials for different tactile sensations.
• Taste: Include edible plants like herbs, fruits, and vegetables. Consider raised beds or containers for easy access to taste. 

Before you try your hand at designing a sensory garden, you may want to visit a public garden with a good example to garner more ideas. Some lovely ones to check out include the Children’s Garden at the Morton Arboretum, the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Zimmerman Sensory Garden, the Green Bay Botanical Garden, and the Dubuque Arboretum and Botanical Gardens.