LENDING COMFORT

Borrow three principles of therapeutic garden design to bolster the enjoyment of your own garden

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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 the staff .

When I design such spaces, 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 ideas and elements that can make any residential garden more pleasing and meaningful. Here are those three principles:

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

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 glimpsing 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 (