Immediately in front of you as you enter the building (assuming you didn't sneak around to one of the many side entrances) is a garden dominated by a large metal cage holding three peacocks. The other thing you can't help but notice is the red trees--bare trees with stems, branches, and trunk a bright coral red. They're a Japanese maple called the Coral Bark maple, and they really are striking, especially against a dark background. This one never caught my attention as much as some of the other gardens did.

Around the corner to the right of the peacock cage rose a dramatic false front defining a European street scene. This exhibit was the least "garden-like" of all the exhibits to me--very little plant material except for a large live oak, and much of the hardscape wasn't something you'd ever put in a garden--it was even more of a stage set than the rest of the exhibits. This garden won the Whimsy award and the designer wasn't too thrilled with it--he wasn't looking forward to going home and telling his clients he won "most whimsical" when he wasn't really going for whimsy in the design.

Continuing around the front central island, you come to a large flat diamond-shaped garden, gently sloping up toward the back and paved with stone around the front point. This is called the Sensuous Garden, and its claim to fame is the plant choices--plants with fragrance, interesting textures to touch, and other features that makes the garden interesting to those who are visually or aurally disabled. Interestingly, with the large paved area up front, the public can't reach any of the plants to find out they are fragrant or soft or fuzzy. What really gets me is how flat the garden is--like it was planned completely in plan view (looking straight down) without any thought to how the elevation (looking across a space) would look. As such, all tall things are along the back fences. There's no vertical interest anywhere else.

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