The Garden of Enid

She is a wife, a mother, and publisher and editor of Seventeen, but Enid A. Haupt, 53, is also a green-thumb gardener. When she visited Manhattan's Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Enid Haupt marveled at its superb equipment and the dedicated ingenuity of its staff. But she bemoaned the fact that children may spend several months there completely cut off from nature. Why not, she asked Director Howard A. Rusk, give them a garden to work in?

Last week the institute, part of the N.Y.U.-Bellevue Medical Center, dedicated the Enid A. Haupt Children's Garden--promptly dubbed "the Garden of Enid" by Dr. Rusk's staff. Around a central greenhouse are plots to be developed by patients of all conditions and sizes. (Though the garden was planned for children, adult patients looked on so wistfully that they will get to use it too.) In the greenhouse, in addition to such decorative come-ons as parrots, a cage of finches and an aquarium, is a wading pool so designed that even children in wheelchairs can roll themselves to its edge and swing around to dabble their toes in it without help.

Main attraction is the array of plants, set on benches of graduated heights so that children or adults, in wheelchairs or standing, can work at them. There the children will grow bougainvillaea to climb a trellis. They will use other trellises for grapes, tomatoes, peas and sweet peas. Children learning to use artificial hands have already set out young plants that can take rough handling.

A special feature is a stretch of bench that might be marked in Braille, "Please touch the flowers." Designed for blind children, it contains cacti without thorns, a patch of herbs including several fragrant geraniums such as the lemon, rose, nutmeg and mint varieties. Within hours of its dedication, the exhibit's leaves had been thoroughly pawed, and many a blind child had pressed scented fingers to nostrils dilating with the joy of discovery.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.