Sense And Sensibility

Discover your garden beyond just admiring the view. Engage your five senses – as well as your mind – to fully experience all that a garden can offer, including lower blood pressure

By Jeff Schnaufer
CTW Features

Your garden may look beautiful and smell great, but are you aware of its other qualities? Get to know your garden and how it can positively impact your life. Image courtesy iStockphoto

Depressed and unresponsive, the elderly woman was wheeled into a room at the nursing home in Leesburg, Fla. Then Hank Bruce walked in with a red geranium.

"She actually reached out to try [to] touch it," Bruce recalls of the stroke victim. "Then she inhaled and smiled. I asked her what her favorite color of geranium was. She said, 'Red.' That was the first she had spoken in about eight weeks."

Sound like a miracle? Some call it the healing power of plants.

"In general, visual activation of female, fast beta brain waves occurs in less than five minutes to red flowering geraniums," says Dr. Richard Mattson of the Horticultural Therapy program at Kansas State University. And that's not all plants can do, he adds.

“Walking through a botanical garden may decrease stress levels as measured by decreased blood pressure in 10 to 20 minutes," he says. "Significant improved changes in the autoimmune system may occur within 40 minutes after experiencing the tactile, visual and aromas of soil and plants/flowers. The sensory stimulation of plants and flowers within a hospital room can significantly decrease pain sensitivity, the need for stronger pain-killing medication, and the length of recovery within a hospital for patients recovering from surgery."

Bruce, a horticultural therapist, lecturer and author in Rio Rancho, N.M., has used plants to help stimulate responses in everyone from Alzheimer's patients to children with special needs. Indeed, he says, just about anyone can use plants to heighten their sensory experiences – and not by smoking them, either.

"When we encourage people to plant their gardens, we encourage them to plant with their senses in mind," says Bruce, author of “Gardens for the Senses, Gardening as Therapy” (Winner Enterprises, 1999), which is considered by many to be the definitive source for sensory gardening.

Take texture, for instance. "You've got things like cabbage leaves. That's a whole different texture than a lettuce leaf," Bruce says. "Or just feeling the texture of a rose petal as opposed to a daisy petal. Rose petals tend to be velvety. And the texture of the onion leaf is different from the leek, which has a triangular leaf stalk. They're very different even though they're closely related."

Jade features a thick, round, fleshy leaf, while the leaf on the aloe plant has a slight serration on the edge, almost like a sawtooth. And then there's the Lamb's Ear, which Bruce says has a very fuzzy leaf that feels just like fur and can grow anywhere in the country.

"With diabetics and aging people, sense of touch is lost or diminished in the fingertips," Bruce says. "But it's almost never lost in the cheeks. We rub the leafs very gently on the cheek. Almost invariably we get a response."

Taste is another sense that can be stimulated by plants in your garden. The taste of fresh ginger roots, for instance, can elicit a variety of memories: ginger ale, ginger snaps and if the season is right, gingerbread cookies. A mint leaf offers fragrance and taste, prompting memories as varied as Doublemint gum to mouthwash.

Like mint, most plants offer stimulation to more than just one of our senses.

"Very rarely is there only one sensory element with the plants," Bruce says. "That's just the way our senses work. They rarely work in isolation."

"With a rose you have the ideal," Bruce says. "You have a variety of colors, scents and textures. Some rose scents are musky, some are spicy, some are apple-scented. The miniature roses have a silky feel to them. And there are some varieties of roses that have a rib petal." Of all the plants on the globe, the dandelion is Bruce's favorite.

"The color is intense, the texture is intriguing, you can take the flowers and make a delicious soup with them or you can take the flower stems and loop them together to make dandelion chains," Bruce says. "And what can be more fun than taking a dandelion seed head, blowing it and watching all the seeds float away? That's fun no matter what your age."

Yet perhaps the greatest sensory benefits of plants come from beyond the five physical senses. Bruce says the sense of harmony that comes from being with the plants, for example, can relieve depression and lower blood pressure.

"But I think probably the most important of the non-physical senses is the sense of wonder," he says. "When your working with the plants, there's always something new, always something different."

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