The Lerner Garden of the Five Senses
What is a garden if not a sensory extravaganza? Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens unveiled its Lerner Garden of the Five Senses in June, 2009. From its position adjacent to the Visitor Center, this garden is the starting point where you can “tune up” your senses before going on to experience the rest of the property. Because it is based on extensive study, augmented by extraordinary expertise, this garden is considered to be the finest sensory garden anywhere, contributing to our reputation as a world-class botanical garden.
Moreover, this garden has been planned so that individuals who are visually impaired or have other disabilities can enjoy it to the fullest – and, thanks to inventive methods, even participate in its planting and maintenance. This, too, is the result of much study and consideration.
The garden is the culmination of years of research and design. In 2001, a planning group was formed consisting of several members of the Gardens’ Board and other volunteers, one of whom is blind. They visited and carefully investigated gardens as far away as Japan to learn everything they could about other sensory gardens in order to optimize the potential of ours.
With the committee’s input, in 2004 award-winning landscape architect Herb Schaal, FASLA, and his team at EDAW in Colorado developed the master plan for our sensory garden. The separate areas for each sense merge into one another through innovative plantings, curved pathways, bridges and water features. A pavilion serves as an outdoor classroom.
Then, in 2007, Lyn and Daniel Lerner of Pennsylvania and Boothbay Harbor, Maine, made a pledge of $1 Million to enable us to build the garden that now bears their name. After more than one year of construction and planting, the festive grand opening of the Lerner Garden of the Five Senses took place on June 19, 2009.
Can You Name The Five Senses?
Quick, name all five senses. Can you think how they’d be interpreted in our Garden of the Five Senses? Let us count the ways:
Touch: Plants with texture; a reflexology walk; water and earth; shapes and sizes
Taste: Edibles from the garden - flowers, fruit, herbs and greens - sweet, sour, salty
Smell: Fragrance, fragrance, fragrance! And possibly a few pungent and odiferous plants for good measure
Sound: Rustling leaves, falling water, breezes in evergreens and other trees
Sight: The full spectrum of colors in flowers, foliage, and features