Brainstorming Grows in the Sensory Garden

A “Please-Touch Museum” concept at the Schuylkill Center underwent its first step toward reality on Tuesday night as visionaries and professionals traded ideas for a sensory garden designed to inspire children with nature’s small wonders.

Unlike many botanical attractions where the enjoyment is primarily visual, the purpose of a sensory garden is to provide children with an instructive and pleasant encounter with nature using all five senses.  It would provide a real-world complement to the interactive children’s exhibit that is the Discovery Center, located in the Main Education Building.

A sub-theme to the project is “Transforming the Back Courtyard,” a presently under-utilized area of the center.

The courtyard upgrade will, the center's education director Gin Ranley said, hopefully transform the space into a more child-friendly area. 

Ranley began development of the sensory garden concept by consulting with the end-users: six and seven-year-olds attending the center’s summer camp and annual picnic were asked what they wanted.

Ideally, Ranley was told, the garden would be both soft and prickly, with a big dirt pile to climb on. Other suggested features included butterfly stations, benches, wind chimes, a rain garden, a tree house, and “a place to tease the squirrels.”

Enter the grown-ups, the people with the know-how and the resources to actually create the garden while not spoiling all the fun in the process.

Nancy Minnich, a landscape architect and adjunct professor at Philadelphia University, brought two of her fourth year students to the brainstorming session to assist with design ideas. She emphasized that the delightful aspects of the garden had to work within major facets of landscape design such as circulation, views, and topography. 

Topography, she said, is an especially important dimension of the project because it affects storm water management as well as aesthetics. 

And it seems others in the 10-person planning group had the same childlike imaginations. Noting that children love the process of mystery leading to discovery, it was suggested that the garden be a place where hidden sights, sounds and smells beckon and reward the curious: statuary peeking out of dense foliage; chimes in high branches lending a musical accompaniment to the wind in the trees; touchable and fragrant local plants pollinated before their very eyes by the center’s own European honey bees; bird feeders as numerous and varied as the fowl that calls the 340-acre refuge home.  

The project has a current budget of $6,300, thanks to seed-money provided by Conshohocken-based steel manufacturer Arcelor Mittal and the Philadelphia Committee of the Garden Club of America. Yet in the final analysis, money still seems to be the only constraint upon the imagination and enthusiasm that will cause the Sensory Garden to bloom for the estimated 6,000 children who will enjoy it each year.