Knowledge
We practice and champion the values of therapeutic horticulture: A means of connecting with nature and others through cultivated landscapes to improve general health, wellbeing, social cohesion and belonging.
Therapeutic Horticulture or Horticultural Therapy?
Australia more typically uses the term therapeutic horticulture, borrowing many of its conceptual underpinnings from social models in the UK. Our friends in America tend to use the term horticultural therapy and historically have focused on using gardening to achieve individual therapy goals that are steeped in bio-medical models of interventions.
We believe there is a place for both, but they are not interchangeable terms.
Our work is heavily influenced by the social model of disability in that it believes in universal design, the right for all to have the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to their own lives, their social circles and their communities more broadly. The onus to overcome barriers for this lie within the systems and designs that continue to exclude all participation, not with the person who is excluded.
Therapeutic horticulture champions a strengths-based approach where collective goals for a garden are achieved through the kaleidoscope of interests and abilities. It focuses on the liminal and sometimes tacit benefits of spending time together, and the impacts these have on wellbeing and belonging.
How is it practiced?
Therapeutic horticulture is a broad umbrella term for the many wonderful ways we can bring people and plants together for wellbeing.
Benefit is typically derived through either:
Active participation
Activities where a person is involved in tasks that utilise the cultivated landscape to provide therapeutic benefit, not limited to just gardening.
Passive Participation
Aesthetic experiences in which a person has little to no effect on the landscape but rather has a sensory connection to it. The therapeutic benefit tends to focus on restoration, reflection, retreat or relaxation.
Therapeutic horticulture design principles
Good design requires us to reflect on the intended use of the space, the lived experience of those it is intended for, and the opportunities nature presents for creating dignifying and inclusive spaces.
Great therapeutic garden design should consider the safety of all users – not just in a physical sense, but also ensuring a psychologically safe space where people feel in control and have choices in how they move through and within the space.
Feeling safe comes from feeling comfortable. Welcoming people into the space by offering them somewhere to sit and rest and regroup is just as powerful as providing opportunities for active engagement.
Universal design ensures everyone can enjoy and meaningfully participate. It isn’t just about access in a physical sense. Access to knowledge about the space is also important.
Access doesn’t ensure inclusion. Inclusion means that people have a sense of purpose and their presence and participation is respected and valued.
Mixed-use functionality helps ensure people can utilise spaces in ways that best suit them, when it is convenient for them. Functional features such as seating and shade should be able to adapt as required.
Seasonal, natural and sensory features help people to engage with and through nature.
This coupled with safety, access, inclusion and meaningful opportunities to engage create therapeutic spaces.
Therapeutic programming priniciples
When looking for an appropriate therapeutic horticulture program, ask what approach will be taken and not just what activities will be done. Benefits come from how people are encouraged to participate, more so than what they will do and learn.
Great therapeutic horticulture programs:
- Foster dynamic, reciprocal and shared relationships between ALL gardeners (including the garden facilitator, carers or therapists in session).
- Acknowledge the dominant narratives and discourses that lead to people feeling disempowered, disengaged and disadvantaged – and acts against these
- Promote self-determination and provides scaffolds for people to practice voice, choice, control and shared power relations in safe ways.
- Ensure accessibility and inclusion through multiple pathways into the space and activities
- Align to a trauma-informed care approach where a person is always in control of how they wish to participate and the facilitator is committed to being trustworthy, dependable and accountable
- Foster opportunities to demonstrate participants’ meaningful contribution to their community beyond the garden.
- Seek to increase social visibility and awareness.