Gardens of Enchantment
The award-winning Gardens of Enchantment is a self-guiding garden with markers both in print & Braille. The gardens comprise five distinct areas, each containing special elements to highlight its own varied beauty, offering the visitor many unique experiences with sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. This 1/2 acre of garden is paved for easy in travel and features a large accessible gazebo with restrooms and seating to rest and enjoy the sights and sounds of the old growth forest.
Hearing Section
The Morning Glory Fountain creates a pleasing sound of falling water. Benches around the pool provide a restful spot where visitors may enjoy the songs of birds, the sounds of water, and the music of wind chimes.
Taste Section
A 64-foot-long elevated bed features herbs of various smells and flavors, both annual and perennial. The herbs may include thyme, spearmint, chocolate mint, chives, fennel, rosemary, sage, dill, sweet marjoram, basil, among others.
Touch Section
In this section we strive to display plants with different textures – ferns, prickly birdnest spruce, mugho pine, soft and fuzzy lambs ear, the satiny leaves of Bergenia, and spiky yucca and red hot poker. Across the path are shrubs offering other interesting textures.
Fragrance Section
This section invites guests to enjoy sweet scented shrubs such as lilacs, peanut butter tree, Carolina allspice, and honeysuckle. In the raised beds, planted for summer and fall bloom, visitors will experience the scents of alyssum, nicotiana, scented geraniums, heliotrope, lilies, and other fragrant varieties of plants.
Sight Section
This area is the framework for the Garden as a whole. The hedges and trees provide a background for the various beds, which are planted mostly with bright annuals in the summer. Many low vision people can distinguish shape and color, so they can enjoy the masses of color along with their sighted friends.