Three Principles of Horticultural Therapy That Benefit Any Garden
Try these design concepts at home
My work as a horticultural therapist bifurcates into two distinct tasks at every facility or residential site that employs me. On the one hand, I develop and implement programming tailored to a specific population’s or individual’s needs. On the other hand, I design and install—sometimes with the help of clients, sometimes not—therapeutic gardens to be enjoyed by my clients, their families and staff.
When I design such gardens, I lean into the guidelines for therapeutic gardens developed by the American Horticultural Therapy Association (AHTA), the national professional organization of horticultural therapists. Of the seven guidelines, three offer important ideas and elements for pleasing and meaningful residential garden design. Here are those three:
1. Make a profusion of plants and people/plant interactions
In my therapeutic garden designs, I’ve been struck by how different individuals encountering the same garden space at the same time of year will be gobsmacked by completely different elements.
In one garden that I installed at a mental-health rehabilitation center, I would bring clients along a path that rounded a gentle bend before revealing the first full view of the nearest section of the garden.
I had one client who, upon first glimpse of the garden one spring, was smitten with a California native penstemon (Penstemon heterophyllus ‘Blue Springs’).
“That blue!” she said as she moved closer to the plant. This same client, in a different therapeutic garden on the center’s campus, was very drawn to the blooms on a Germander sage (Salvia chamaedryoides). She was clearly very attuned to, and very moved by, the beautiful palette of blues that certain plants offer us.
That same spring, another client entering the garden on the exact same path said, “What’s that beautiful smell?” It was the hyacinths perfuming the air.
A third client saw the honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) nodding its pendulous, purple-flowered stems and made a beeline for it.
My point is that people are different. It’s why cilantro tastes soapy to some people, yummy to others. Different plants, and different aspects of different plants, will appeal to different people for reasons that are as individual as snowflakes. By planting a broad diversity of plants in your garden, you increase the opportunities for plant/people interactions. As friends and relations visit your garden, you will be offering something to attract and fascinate each of them.
2. Apply the concept of universal design to your senses and seasons
The AHTA guideline of “universal design” refers to creating gardens that are accessible to the widest possible number of people, regardless of any physical or cognitive challenges, so that all can experience the sensory stimulation that a garden provides.
In the home garden, this design principle expands on the previous one, as it acknowledges the importance of delighting all of our senses, all year round. We assume that we will be delighted visually by a garden, be it the lush abundance of the late-summer vegetable and flower plot or the stark beauty of the snowed-in winterscape with its persistent leeks, frost-dusted cabbages and dried coneflower stems and seeds.
But it behooves the residential gardener to consider how to nourish other senses throughout the year as well. Spring, with its narcissi, hyacinths, lilacs and sweet peas, and summer to fall, with tuberose, Dianthus and basils, provide lots of delightful olfactory input. But the flowers that scent the air in winter provide a genuine service because it’s so unexpected. Thank you to viburnums, witch hazels (Hamamelis), winter daphne (Daphne odora) and sweetbox (Sarcococca hookeriana).
The fuzzy leaves of mullein (Verbascum thapsus), Plectranthus tomentosa and lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina), and the fuzzy flowers of kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos) and Mexican sage (Salvia leucantha) ask to be caressed, as does the smooth red bark of a manzanita (Arctostaphylos).
You can invite auditory experiences by including the kinds of plants that produce rattly seedpods, like love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) and breadseed poppies (Papaver somniferum), or by planting grasses and leafy shrubs that rustle and murmur when a breeze moves through them.
I mention these plants only as inspiration. Start noticing the plants in your environment that smell great; that feel soft or hairy or ultra-smooth or pebbly; that rustle or rattle or pop. After all, it’s your garden. It’s most important that it delights your senses.
3. Create benign and supportive conditions
This guideline ensures that visitors to a therapeutic garden will find inviting spaces to rest and replenish, to simply enjoy what the garden gives.
When I was in training as a horticultural therapist and learning about therapeutic garden design, my instructor insisted that we always include spaces where clients could sob freely yet privately, as well as spaces where people could weep quietly, from joy or sorrow, to themselves.
You may not have space to offer all that, but hopefully you’ll have enough room to allow yourself and maybe one or two others to relax and take in the garden. A shady nook may accommodate a hammock, a couple of Adirondack chairs or even a small folding chair that you open up at dusk to listen to the whirr of the hummingbird’s wings and to notice as the moonflowers unfurl to welcome the first moths of the evening.
