MANCHESTER — —
Gardening was Joan Kelsey’s passion, but it got harder to do when she lost the ability to walk, let alone kneel in the dirt.

Kelsey, a 30-year Manchester Garden Club member who uses a wheelchair, has struggled for years to find a green space where she can move around, with plants she can reach. That struggle got easier last week when Manchester’s Wickham Park opened a new garden to help people like Kelsey get back in touch with nature — albeit in a painstakingly constructed man-made setting.

The Sensory Garden, the latest addition to the park’s collection, is intended to be accessible to anyone. The garden is designed to engage each different human sense. So, for example, a blind person who visits the park will be able to smell the flowers, listen to recordings of nature sounds, and touch textured leaves. Someone in a wheelchair will be able to move across the brick walkways and work in the elevated planters, which lift the plants up to an easily reachable height.

And that makes a huge difference, Kelsey says.

“[Gardening] is part of who I am,” she said. “It’s my soul. I’ve had to give up the bulk of it, but I also learned there’s other ways to do it, and this place makes that possible.”

Jeffrey Maron, the park’s director, says that he expects the garden to become the park’s signature feature. It’s the largest of its kind in New England, he says, and one of the largest in the world.

The garden has six sections looped together by a brick walkway. Five are dedicated to engaging each of the different senses. In the smell area, for example, visitors are asked to smell flowers and identify different scents like baby powder, grape and peppermint. In the taste section, there are fruits and vegetables, and in the sound section, there are recordings of nature.

The sixth section is dedicated to imagination. There’s a fanciful statue and some of the garden’s stranger looking plants, like the pom-pom juniper, which looks like a Dr. Seuss creation. It’s also probably one of the few gardens in the state with a working model train.

The roughly $300,000 project took the park’s small staff more than two years to plan and build. Most of the construction was done in-house (Maron even learned how to weld) and many of the materials were donated. The donations, monetary and otherwise, marked the first time Wickham Park has turned to outside sources of funding, Maron says.

The park called in the extra help, he said, because of the special nature of the project, as well as its expense. Dozens of different organizations and individuals, including advocates for those with disabilities, local home improvement companies and several garden clubs contributed time, information and money. The help was especially useful this year after the financial crisis decimated the park’s trust left by the Wickham family by nearly a third, to roughly $10 million. The park’s annual operating budget, which is a small percentage of the trust, also declined, though slightly, Maron said.

Wickham Park consists of 250 acres of rolling greens, sports facilities, and eight different gardens. This one, Maron says, isn’t likely to be the last. It is the most unusual though, and shows promise of becoming the biggest draw.

“Where most of our gardens are tranquil,” says Maron, the sensory garden is meant to “wake people up.” It engages on every possible level, he says, meaning “everyone’s going to be here — people in wheelchairs, people who are athletic.” He says the goal is to make the appeal of gardens universal. He wants, he says, “to have people come here as a destination to see gardens and to enjoy nature.”

“We’ve still got to get the word out,” Maron said. “But this sort of thing will hopefully be the start of it.”

Source- http://www.ctnow.com/news/connecticut/hartford/hc-hc-manchester-new-garden-0524-20100523,0,1897870.story

When we’re young, we’re used to seeing our parents as the picture of health. They’re always there for us to lean on - whatever the reason.

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