Senses and Sensibility

Photograph by David Gordon

Students at the Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Mass., often can be found smelling fragrant flowers or fingering fuzzy plant leaves in the airy Thomas and Bessie Pappas Horticulture Center.

The new $2-million greenhouse has allowed the school to expand the horticultural programs it offers to its students, who are blind or deaf and blind, or have a visual impairment in addition to other disabilities. In addition to attending some regular science classes in the greenhouse and participating in plant-therapy programs, students can relax by its water fountain when they need a break from the day’s activities. Students can also learn vocational skills by spending time potting and caring for plants and participating in craft projects, such as making wreaths out of herbs grown in the greenhouse.

Interacting with flora and fauna offers students — who often rely on others to help them shower, eat, dress, or read — an opportunity to take care of living things, an experience that can enhance their mood and lead to greater self-esteem, says Deborah Krause, director of the school’s horticultural-therapy program. “For our kids, it helps them by giving them incredible pleasure through the senses,” she says.

A little more than half the school’s 200 residential and day students, ages 3 to 22, participate in the horticultural-therapy program. In addition, visually impaired elderly residents of Watertown and nearby towns visit the center for activities such as crafts or poetry readings as part of the school’s Elder Outreach Program.

The school, which celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, receives more than half of its $47-million annual budget from tuition, with a little more than 10 percent coming from gifts from private sources and government agencies. Other revenue comes from sales of materials for the blind and investment income.

Here, a young student pauses to smell an amaryllis in the new horticulture center.