Sensory: of or relating to sensation or to the senses.

People have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

Summer 2011 Sensory Garden

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Achillea in the Sensory Garden, June 20, 2011

Sensory Garden

Intention and PurposeThis tactile, interactive garden expands The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s existing education programs, including Play in the Dirt and New World Kids, which encourage participants to explore, play, create, and reflect. The garden, as a literal and symbolic entryway to the Museum, encourages visitors to talk about form and content before they enter and after they leave the galleries. This participatory education project explores themes that reflect the Museum’s current exhibitions, because growing plants—like making art—involves a process that is as important as the end result.

The garden space and its contents are curated on a yearly basis to best reflect current Museum exhibitions. For the 2011 rotation, the focus is on Jessica Stockholder’s Hollow Places Wood in Ash-Tree Court project, and only native New England plants have been used for the garden. The ash tree is not only a native specimen, but it is endangered in New England, so special emphasis has been placed on native endangered trees, their life cycles and uses. Since the Museum’s own ash tree died and was removed several years ago, the garden complements Stockholder’s project, site-specific work she created using wood salvaged from that tree. Themes from the other artists’ work are explored in the garden, using attributes like leaf shape, color, pattern, and scale. Each plant has a multi-functional role to play, whether it is aromatic, displays texture, keeps pests away, or attracts pollinators.

The changeable, multi-sensory garden at The Aldrich is an interdisciplinary space, emphasizing ecological processes and relationships among plants, while providing a context in which to ask “What if?” and experiment with the results. The space addresses a diverse audience, encompassing discovery and exploration for all ages and abilities.

Site DesignFrom June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011, The Aldrich hosted a multi-part outdoor work by Fritz Haeg that included an “edible estate” vegetable garden on the Museum’s front lawn. Inspired by the project’s social, ecological, and educational benefit to the Museum, this lawn space has been reinvented, to create a flexible Museum garden that will be constantly reinterpreted in connection with future exhibitions. The site includes a slope that is mass-planted with sunflowers, wild flowers, and a groundcover to prevent soil erosion and water run-off. The beds are roughly 65 x 8 feet, 5 x 4 feet, and 80 x 4 feet, creating a U-shaped visual path that leads visitors from the Museum entrance out towards the Main Street Sculpture Project. The 5-foot bed, a continuation of the 80-foot-long bed, turns the corner to complete the plantings and features an open grass section that allows access to the interior of the garden. Visitors are encouraged to experience the space from different angles and to enjoy the picnic tables and open space.

Participation and AccessMuseum staff, docents, and volunteers with a special interest in the project maintain The Aldrich’s garden. Visitors are welcome to linger there and are encouraged to ask questions. The garden is both a complement to the Museum’s exhibitions and an ongoing stand-alone education project.

Kate Sokol, Education Intern

look. look again.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org