Garden for the blind

[osprey_archer]

You know what is AMAZING? Italian waffles with Nutella. (The Italians use waffles as a gelato platform. They have about the same nutritional value as a Twix bar and are crunchy with sugar crystals around the edges.

I went to Florence's Botanical Garden yesterday. It was founded in 1345, and apparently the maintenance money ran out soon after. It's scruffy and weedy, with cracked glass in the greenhouses and scummy ponds of waterlilies and lotuses.

However, it did have one feature I really liked. A row of pots of sweet-scented plants, parsley sage, rosemary and thyme (sans parsley), with Braille labels: a special garden for the blind.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

When I saw the subject line, I had this idea of what a garden for the blind should be:

a garden of fragrant perennials that bloom at different times, so that as the season goes by, you get a parade of different scents. Also, the plants' foliage should have all different sorts of textures--some should be soft like lamb's ear or mullein, others bouncy like creeping thyme, others silky like decorative absinthe, others prickly, like thistle.

Wouldn't that be great?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes! That would be amazing! It would be an interesting setting for a story. And Garden for the Blind wouldn't be a bad title, now that I think of it.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

As I recall, the novel The Lady and the Unicornhad a blind daughter in a family of weavers, and I think they had a garden something like this (or maybe it was just that she knew the plants by their fragrances).

(I didn't care much for the novel, but bits and pieces of it stuck with me.)