
Most of us plan our gardens to look nice - colourful, lush and leafy, or at least, green and tidy.
What if we planned our gardens to appeal to all of our senses? To look appealing, to smell sweet or herby, to sound gentle and relaxing, to feel soft or smooth, to taste delicious? What pleasures our gardens would bring! New Years are often a time to start on a program of self care - less alcohol and more water, less sitting and more moving, less rushing and more mindfulness, fewer fries and more fruits. Getting in touch with our bodies and minds, and taking better care of them.
So we're embarking on some sensory self-care, with the help of our outdoor spaces.
What if we planned our gardens to appeal to all of our senses? To look appealing, to smell sweet or herby, to sound gentle and relaxing, to feel soft or smooth, to taste delicious? What pleasures our gardens would bring! New Years are often a time to start on a program of self care - less alcohol and more water, less sitting and more moving, less rushing and more mindfulness, fewer fries and more fruits. Getting in touch with our bodies and minds, and taking better care of them.
 
Sensory Gardens - Soft Touch

 
A warm enveloping hug. The firm fingers of a masseur untying the knots in your neck. Stroking a pet's soft fur, or the fuzzy warmth of your favourite sweater. Aaah, bliss...Touch can bring us a lot of pleasure and calming relaxation - and there's a lot of tactile pleasure to be had from a garden, if you know where to feel for it.Soft kitty, warm kitty,
little ball of fur.
Sleepy kitty, happy kitty,
purr purr purr.
 

lamb's ears or bunny's ears (Stachys lanata), named because they are so strokeably soft to touch (its botanic species name, 'lanata', means woolly in Latin, hence lanolin, the oil from sheep fleece, is wool-oil); native woolly bush (Adenanthos); silverbush (Convolvulus cneorum); pewter plant (Strobilanthes gossypinus) Gossypium is the botanic name for cotton, so pewter plant's 'gossypinus' means "like a cotton wool ball".
 
If you enjoy this word-play with plant names, you can discover much more about a plant from its name in our post What Plant Names Can Tell Us 

You'll find a lot of them in our post on Silver-Leaved Plants. Many Mediterranean shrubs - lavender , curry bush , cat thyme (Teucrium) - are soft-to-touch with a suede-like sensation; it's why they also appreciate a dry climate, where (like a pair of suede shoes) those fine hairs don't experience humidity and rain.
 
Clockwise from top left :softly-strokeable grey leaved plants include licorice plant (Helichrysum);
buddleias Lochinch and Morning Mist have super-soft new leaves;
and so does silver-leaf gazania. Cotton lavender or lavender cotton (Santolina) here, and native yellow buttons (Chrysocephalum), make a perfect sensory pairing in dry climate gardens (and as far north as Sunshine Coast-Wide Bay Burnett in inland or airy sites.)Both have soft-touch grey foliage, and daisy flowers reduced to a central yellow disc, fuzzy and soft like the leaves.
 

 

 

 

It's all about that water-retention and sun protection.
 
Other plants with a velvet feel originate in rainforests, or subtropical zones, and the furry surface is hiding on the underside of the leaf.The upper surface is smooth and glossy, so the abundant rain rolls off easily. You'll encounter this in velvet calathea bottom right, which gets its common name because each leaf is gently furry beneath;
and in bull magnolia bottom left, whose leaves are glossy on top with a suede-soft reverse.
 

silver-leaved emu bush (Eremophila) - especially the varieties Kalbarri Carpet, Silver Ball and Blue Horizon; kangaroo paws (Anigozanthos and Macropidia) with their fuzzy-velvety flowers and stems; softly silky silver wattle (Acacia) has bonus fluffy pompom flowers too!; and downy ziera (Zieria), their new leaves super-soft to touch.
 

to wiry and silky and bristly flowerheads;
from furry-felt new leaves
and downy-suede new cones,
to some awesomely rugged woody-bark mature pods. All the feels!
 

open up slowly into fatter flowers,
and stay on the bushes for a long time,
eventually becoming those woody pods -
so whatever month you encounter a banksia, there'll be something to feel and fondle.
 

Sensory Gardens - Ripple Touch
They're not furry or felty, fluffy or prickly - but they are well worth feeling! We call these the 'ripple' plants, as they have a rippled, ridged, ruched, wrinkled texture. Clockwise, from top left : peperomia (Peperomia) has super-crinkly-wrinkly leaves ;extremely wiggly bird's nest lasagne fern (Asplenium antiquum nidus var plicatum 'Lasagna' - phew!) reminds us of a Streets Viennetta;
red secret alocasia (Alocasia cuprea) is ripped like a six-pack;
and the new leaves of maidenhair fern (Adiantum), are gently ruffled and layered, soft to the touch.
 
Sensory Gardens - Fluffy Touch

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,The poet Francis Darwin Cornford knows where it's at.
Missing so much and so much? O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
 

 
Take a calming relaxing moment next time you pass by a flowering grass, and run your hand slowly down one of the stems from root to tip. You'll feel a difference in fluffiness between newly opened flowerheads, silky and dense; and fully mature ones. Clockwise, from top left : smooth upright foxtail spear grass (Austrostipa), (check out the floaty-light wallaby grass (Austrodanthonia) too);chinese silver grass (Miscanthus);
swamp grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides);
purple fountain grass (Pennisetum advena Rubrum). For parts of the garden that get a wetter soil, you can't go past the native restio tassel cord rush - smooth stems erupt into feathery-light ferny fronds.
 

 

 
Clockwise from top left:Irish moss (Selagina) - You'll see some of these little tuffets planted out like a carpet in our QLD Garden Expo stand;
there's a longer looser form called Scotch moss too; cushion bush (Scleranthus) - like the Selagina moss, there's a tight-bun form and a more loosey-goosey, longer-stemmed form;
no mow grass (Zoysia), which grows in natural rounded hummocks;
and pink and white sea thrift (Armeria), which pops up pink and white papery balls of flowers above the grassy tufts.
 

and both form these rounded open natural mounds, perfect for petting, when planted in a pot
 
Sensory Gardens - Spiky Touch

 
Some plants have a few hidden thorns to contend with - some dramatic and ornamental; some secretive and functional, as a form of defence against being eaten. Did you know: the closer to the ground a holly leaf grows, the more indented and prickly the edges?Leaves that grow on the tops of holly bushes and trees, out of the reach of passing herbivorous browsers, are often completely smooth around the leaf rims. Defence, you see. A plant can't run away, but it can protect itself.
 
The shrubs here have the benefit of making excellent security hedges; to deter people from coming in to your garden, and pets from getting out. Clockwise from top left: flying dragon citrus (Poncirus), barberry (Berberis), holly (Ilex), cane berry plants - raspberry, blackberry, youngberry, boysenberry (Rubus species) 

 
As every sado-masochist knows, a little pain makes the pleasure all the sweeter. Or at least, a garden made of of contrasts - smooth and rough, fluffy and shiny, soft and spiky, flat and wrinkled - is far more interesting to engage with! Clockwise from top left: almost-softmonkey's tail (Cleistocactus),
twinflower agave (Agave geminiflora), smooth-stemmed with a sharp tip
thimble or nipple cactus (Mammillaria),
and the hyper-thorny crown of thorns (Euphorbia milii).
Who would think this last plant belonged to the same family as the soft-leaved winter-red poinsettia?
 

Sensory Gardens - Touch
Were you told to "look with your eyes, not with your hands" , as a child?To not touch or pick anything, especially when you were in someone else's garden?
 
Children know best - part of the joy of gardening is getting down and dirty, sticking your hands into the soil, picking up a worm or fashioning a daisy chain. 
In your own garden, get hands-on and touch everything! 
Push your fingers into the soil, and sense the temperature get cooler and the soil get damper to the touch, the deeper you go. Kick off your thongs and soothe your hot feet on cool grass.
 
Close your eyes. Feel the warmth of sunlight on your skin, or a gentle breeze cooling you. 
A sensory garden of touch is a secret world of pleasure for gardeners. You never know what you might discover with your fingertips - and toes!