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Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens features COA work
Summer 2008 - Boothbay, Maine
Snapdragon Garden, photo by Cristian Van Heerden

A medieval garden plot complete with an enchanted forest, castle turret and writhing red dragon made of whalebones, snapdragons and the horns of a kudu, is among the attractions at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay this summer. The garden, created by College of the Atlantic students and staff, is one of several plots designed especially for the enjoyment of children.

Last winter, The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens invited landscape architects and other plant professionals to submit whimsical children's garden designs for a summer exhibition. Among the eight chosen was COA's Snapdragon Garden, the only non-professional organization in the display.

Working with a group of students, Isabel Mancinelli, faculty member in planning and landscape architecture and holder of the Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy & Design, came up with the idea of a medieval theme that would use snapdragons for the body of a dragon. In keeping with the college's inherent commitment to sustainability, Mancinelli and the students decided that all materials would be made from recycled and found objects. As always at COA, all plants are organic; these were grown from seed by COA students.

The growing of the plants, creation of the props and installation of the garden became part of Mancinelli's spring class, "Plants and Landscapes for Education and Historic Interpretation." Additional help came from classmates in the "Gardens and Greenhouses" course taught by Suzanne Morse, faculty member in biology and holder of the Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany.

According to Mancinelli, "the design of the garden was inspired by memories of my own children becoming excited about gardens when I made the snapdragons 'talk' by squeezing the edges of the flowers. This led to the idea of making a dragon out of snapdragons and creating part of a castle and an enchanted forest, images that fill the imaginations of nearly every child at one time or another."

One of the features of the garden is the castle turret - shingled with leftovers from the college's housing project - made from a super-composting Green Cone, with a sign that explains the cone's hot composting system that composts meat, bones and other kitchen waste. Additional materials include a wooden bridge and a village made from scale models of houses from past architectural classes - thatched with straw from the college's community gardens. The miniature enchanted forest is shaped from corkscrew willow branches growing on campus and pruned by the students. These form the base for scarlet runner beans. While some plants-like the blue lobelia that forms the stream-are chosen for color, others are chosen by name: love lies bleeding, dragon's blood sedum and black dragon coleus.