ORONO – Lauren Chase likes plants a lot. She likes to grow, touch and smell them, but she absolutely loves to eat them.

“I like the chocolate mint best,” she said, nibbling on a leaf of the plant, “but the orange mint is okay too.”

The 10-year-old is a fourth-grader at Asa Adams School. She’s visually impaired and uses other senses – touch and smell – to garden in the school’s greenhouse.

A project Lauren and her educational aide Kim Anderson have been working on this winter will be part to the Kids Grow, Too! program at the Bangor Garden Show this weekend.

Lauren’s project is one of 439 entered this year, according to coordinator Laurie Richards. The fourth-grader is the only single entrant. All other entries are class or group projects, said Richards, a first-grade teacher at the Pendleton School in Brewer.

Lauren, the daughter of David and Rebecca Chase, decided to title her project, “Follow Me Down the Yellow Brick Road.”

She planned to place the plants she started from seeds in a shallow box, then paint a winding yellow road around them. She wants other children to run their fingers through the rye grass, sniff the chocolate mint and inhale the scent of the orange mint, too.

“Those are her favorite plants,” said Anderson. “She likes the ones she can eat best. We had to start them several times because she eating them as fast as they came up.”

Anderson, who’s been working with Lauren since last fall, believed the hands-on, sensory experience of working with nature would allow the girl to create something she could take pride in.

The aide said that once a week, Lauren and her friends share lunch in the greenhouse. She shares nibbles on the edible plants and points out which plants have broken through the soil since the previous week’s picnic.

Asa Adams has had the greenhouse, paid for with grant money, for more than a decade. Once coordinated by volunteer parents who worked with pupils, the program now has a part-time employee, Dick Sales, who coordinates the pupils’ work in the greenhouse with teachers.

Sales set aside a station in the greenhouse for Lauren, who attends to her plants every day. She even dresses for gardening, last week wearing bright yellow tights with flowers on them, and red shoes similar to gardening clogs.

The Orono School Department’s commitment to gardening extends to the high school, which has a small tree farm between the main building and a portable classroom. The farm fulfills the educational component of the Tree City USA program, which the town joined five years ago.

Orono is one of only 11 municipalities in Maine participating in the program, sponsored by the National Arbor Day Foundation, and the state’s northernmost designee.

Trees are planted as saplings, according to Emily Wesson, the school district’s nurse who assists students in caring for the farm. The first saplings planted five years ago were moved to a grassy area at the back of the high school. Students put in a bark-covered walkway and benches, and transplanted red and silver maple trees.

Next month, Wesson said, students will transplant more than 20 maples on the hill that runs from the front of the library down to the Asa Adams parking lot. Eventually, she said, the trees should shade the parking lot and help keep the hillside from eroding. Trees from the farm also have been transplanted to parks, town-owned green spaces and private residences, said the nurse.

Wesson believes that gardening and growing trees are an integral part of her work as a nurse. Outside her office is a cart full of plants, and a model of a building that has grass growing on its roof. The nurse believes working with growing things is therapeutic, and often asks students to help her care for the plants if they have come to her upset about something that’s going on in their lives.

“I’ll grab kids out of the hall if they appear to be wandering,” she said last week as students hovered around her closet-sized office. “Or, if kids are waiting for parents to pick them up because they aren’t feeling well, I’ll have them trim the grass or plant seeds.”

The nurse was inspired to show students a building with a “green roof” after reading about a “green” office complex in Harare, Zimbabwe. Planted with grasses and succulents, low- profile “green roofs” reportedly reduce the urban heat “island effect,” storm water runoff and cooling costs, while providing wildlife habitat and a connection to nature for building occupants.

Wesson designed her simple model, which has a colorful mosaic floor designed by Alicia Delaney, a high school artist, to illustrate how “green roofs” could enhance modern office buildings or skyscrapers. It will be on display at the garden show, but not part of the Kids Grow, Too! program.

The seven-year-old Kids Grow, Too!, for pupils in kindergarten through grade eight is primarily focused on class projects about gardening and recycling. Children, however, are capable of participating in projects at a younger age, Richards added. Two pre-schools have entered project this year.

Pendleton’s own class centered its project on root vegetables by using as its them Peter Rabbit, who turns 100 this year. She said that most Kids Grow, Too! projects, include those of her pupils, are started in January.

The Bangor Garden Show will be open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. April 12-13, and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. April 14. Admission is $8 for adults, $3 for children, free for children under 5.