blog « Therapeutic Landscapes Network

Happy Birthday to Us!

January 30, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Prothonotary warbler. Photo by Henry Domke, http://henrydomke.com

Okay, really happy birth month, since I seem to have missed the day (whoops!). My first Therapeutic Landscapes Network Blog post was three whole years ago, on January 2nd, 2008.

A lot has happened since then, including a name change for the Blog (was originally the Therapeutic Landscapes Database Blog) and the organization itself (was the Therapeutic Landscapes Resource Center).

Our interdisciplinary network of designers, health and human service providers, gardeners, and nature enthusiasts continues to grow, and energy just keep building.

As always, the Therapeutic Landscapes Network Blog provides information, education, and inspiration about gardens and landscapes that promote health and well-being. And as always, I see this blog not as a one-way virtual newspaper but as a forum for communication and dialog. I LOVE comments because they create a conversation. That’s what makes this Network so strong and vibrant.

Thanks to all of you for reading, for subscribing, for commenting, and for supporting the TLN!

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‘Healing Landscapes’ is this year’s topic at Cleveland Botanical Garden’s Sustainability Symposium

January 28, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Next weekend, on Friday and Saturday February 4-5, the Cleveland Botanical Garden will hold it’s 6th annual Sustainability Symposium, and the topic this year is “Healing Spaces.” The Symposium, geared toward landscape professionals and home gardeners, will feature an action-packed and continuing-education-credit-filled roster of speakers.

Friday’s keynote speaker is renowned landscape architect David Kamp, founding principal of Dirtworks Landscape Architecture, PC. David will speak about “Collaboration in the Garden: Creating Restorative Environments.” David/Dirtworks designed the beautiful and Elizabeth and Nona Evans Restorative Garden at the CBG, and I’m sure he will talk about the design process in his keynote address. Dirtworks, based in New York City, is a member of the TLN’s Designers and Consultants Directory.

Saturday’s keynote speaker is Naomi Sachs, founding Director of the Therapeutic Landscapes Network and principal at Naomi Sachs Design. The title of her (my) talk is “Green Healing: Landscapes for Health and Well-Being.”

Other speakers for Friday and Saturday (see program for details) include

Landscape artist David Slawson on “The Art of Evoking the Natural World in Restorative Gardens.”
Cleveland Botanical Garden Glasshouse Specialist Joe Mehalik on “Water in the Garden.”
Western Reserve Herb Society’s Carolyn Borsini on “Sustaining Ourselves and Others with Herbs.”
Cleveland Botanical Garden Director of Horticulture Cynthia Druckenbrod on “Bringing Butterflies to Your Yard.”
Amy Roskilly, Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District Conservation Education Coordinator, on “Rain Gardens as Environmental Protection.”
And a member of the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority on “Planting a Vision, Growing a Community: the Future of Public Housing.”

Hope to see you there!

It’s in the Dirt! Bacteria in soil may make us happier, smarter

January 24, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Yum, dirt! Photo by Guy Ambrosino. A big thank you to Horticulture Magazine for featuring this post on their website. We are honored to be chosen as one of their Best Gardening Blogs 2011!

AND to the National Wildlife Federation for featuring this article as a guest post on their blog!

Many people, including me, talk about the restorative benefits of gardening (see last Tuesday’s post, for example) and the reasons why it makes us feel good. Just being in nature is already therapeutic, but actively connecting with nature through gardening is value-added. And why is that? All sorts of reasons have been posited: It’s a meditative practice; it’s gentle exercise; it’s fun; it allows us to be nurturing and to connect with life on a fundamental level.

And some recent research has added another missing piece to the puzzle: It’s in the dirt. Or to be a little more specific, a strain of bacterium in soil, Mycobacterium vaccae, has been found to trigger the release of seratonin, which in turn elevates mood and decreases anxiety. And on top of that, this little bacterium has been found to improve cognitive function and possibly even treat cancer and other diseases. Which means that contact with soil, through gardening or other means (see Elio, above), is beneficial. How did this discovery come about?

(more…)

Biophilia

January 22, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Virgin tiger moth. Photo by Henry Domke, http://henrydomke.com

Virgin tiger moth. Photo by Henry Domke, www.henrydomke.com

“Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.”

Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia

Allotment Therapy: More empirical evidence on the salutary benefits of gardening

January 19, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Warrenville Lakes Homeowners Community Garden. Photo by Shawna Coronado, www.shawnacoronado.com

Speaking of allotment gardens (see our 1/13 post about Charlie Hopkinson’s photography of allotment gardens), here’s an interesting study:

30 allotment gardeners were assigned to do a stressful task (not related to gardening). Immediately after, half of the gardeners worked in their own allotment plot and half read indoors, both for 30 minutes. With both groups, cortisol (a stress indicator) and self-reported stress levels went down, but they decreased significantly more in the group that gardened. I think I’m going to build me a greenhouse…

And here’s a moving blog by someone who struggles with depression and finds solace in her allotment garden. The blog is Allotment Therapy: A personal view of Ecotherapy, and the post is “The Wisdom of Plants.”

Stay tuned for another article on this topic, coming very soon!

Full abstract (link to the Journal of Health Psychology website to access the abstract and to buy the article): Stress-relieving effects of gardening were hypothesized and tested in a field experiment. Thirty allotment gardeners performed a stressful Stroop task and were then randomly assigned to 30 minutes of outdoor gardening or indoor reading on their own allotment plot. Salivary cortisol levels and self-reported mood were repeatedly measured. Gardening and reading each led to decreases in cortisol during the recovery period, but decreases were significantly stronger in the gardening group. Positive mood was fully restored after gardening, but further deteriorated during reading. These findings provide the first experimental evidence that gardening can promote relief from acute stress.

Full citation: Van Den Berg, Agnes and Custers, Mariëtte H.G. (2011). “Gardening Promotes Neuroendocrine and Affective Restoration from Stress.” Journal of Health Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 3-11.

“What makes a prison landscape therapeutic?” Guest post by Amy Lindemuth

January 18, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Garden at Rikers Island. Photo by Hilda Krus

Last week, we published an article by guest blogger Amy Lindemuth, “Can prison landscapes be secure, restorative, and ecologically sustainable?” This was the first of two articles, and this week we give you the second:

What makes a prison landscape therapeutic? by Amy Lindemuth

In my last post, I discussed the possibility that the accepted cultural norm for prison and jail landscapes of ubiquitous mown lawn, chain link, blank walls, and wire could be shifted to include greater plant diversity and visual complexity. From our perspective as advocates of healthy, healing places, the primary goal of such an effort would be to increase the potential for these spaces to provide therapeutic benefits for users and improve the ecological health of the site. Yet, I’ve begun to ask myself the question, within the context of corrections complexes, what makes an open space “therapeutic” or “restorative”? In describing a new sustainable, therapeutic garden at the VA Puget Sound Fisher House in Seattle, local landscape architect Jan Satterthwaite (www.vireods.com) made this distinction: “What makes the therapeutic garden at a hospital special involves an understanding of what might help ‘transport’ people away from the medical process or the medical center.” See this ASLA Healthcare and Therapeutic Design Newsletter for the full article.

In the garden at Rikers Island. Photo by Hilda Krus

The GreenHouse Project gardens at Rikers Island Jails are located in a secured area. Students in the program have been screened and are considered to be a low security risk. Photo by Hilda Krus

I think this is true for gardens in prisons and jails, but corrections settings also have a unique set of circumstances and constraints compared to hospitals. As I’ve discussed, differing security levels within the same facility determine the level of landscape complexity that can occur in different open spaces. Usually these open spaces are so stark and bleak that I find myself wondering whether any kind of interesting landscape elements, even annual borders, offer some healthful benefits. Certainly elements this simple cannot generate the deep, lasting changes discussed in the research literature on therapeutic landscapes. Yet, in an environment where the bar for landscapes is despairingly low, these simple gestures may offer a symbol of normalcy that helps reduce someone’s stress in that instant or set a helpful tone for the day.

Vegetable garden at Rikers Island. Photo by Amy Lindemuth

Open spaces in prisons and jails can and do range from the simple to the complex. I think one of the responsibilities of designers and corrections administrators is to push for these landscapes to do more and serve multiple functions, from addressing stormwater onsite and improving habitat function to helping reduce stress among officers and inmates. I believe this approach can be accomplished without compromising overall security. Rather than planting lawn, what if high security areas had plants 24” or less in height which were physically inaccessible to inmates? These low height landscapes could provide better functionality in terms of reducing irrigation and maintenance requirements and addressing stormwater than is possible with mown lawn. The visual relief provided by these areas could also offer more to staff and inmates in terms of normalizing the work and living environment. Our mental image of what prison landscapes look like needs to expand to include typologies that address multiple site functions, site functionality, and staff and inmate health while meeting the requirements of the various security zones within the site.

Garden and greenhouse at Rikers Island. Photo by Hilda Krus

Amy Lindemuth is the author of “Beyond the Bars: Landscapes for Health and Healing in Corrections,” a chapter in the forthcoming Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience and Community Greening edited by Keith G. Tidball and Marianne E. Krasny. She practices in Seattle, WA. For Amy’s full bio, please see her previous post, “Can prison landscapes be secure, restorative, and ecologically sustainable?“

The Allure of Allotment Gardens: An interview with photographer Charlie Hopkinson

January 13, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Walworth Community Garden, UK. Photo by Charlie Hopkinson, www.charliehopkinson.com

Charlie Hopkinson, a photographer based in the UK, has two primary subjects: People and gardens. Among many other things, he shoots portraits for Gardens Illustrated, which is how I met him, on an uncharacteristically sunny day at Kew Gardens in London. We talked about all sorts of things, but his interest in shooting allotment gardens (akin to community gardens in the U.S.) intrigued me. I asked him to send me some images, and then invited him to do this short interview.

Photo by Charlie Hopkinson, www.charliehopkinson.com

NS: You have photographed some pretty high-profile people, from John Malkovich and Angelica Houston to Beth Chatto and Dan Pearson. And your landscape and botanical photographs are beautiful, though somewhat more formal than this series (is it officially a series?). What interests you about allotment gardens?
CH: I’m interested in photographing allotments because they almost always reflect the personality of the gardener. Many of the formal gardens I photograph reflect the personality of the garden designer. Allotment gardens are often pretty unstructured, which I like, purely functional as opposed to decorative which I like, and they are usually arranged in straight lines, which I find far more visually interesting that clever curves and so on. I love straight lines in photographs.

Do you have an allotment garden?
I don’t, but I’m making a garden at the moment, and allotments are the principle inspiration, especially function over decoration, straight lines, and a certain unstructured approach!

Photo by Charlie Hopkinson, www.charliehopkinson.com

If money were no object, would you travel the world shooting allotment gardens, or is there something special about them being in the UK?
I would travel the world doing just that. I recently went to Kenya, and came across the odd allotment here and there, and photographed them. They were fairly scruffy and unkempt. There’s nothing special about UK allotments as far as I’m concerned. Up to now, this has been an idle thing I have done here and there. I would, given time, make a more studied effort, but it would have to include the allotment gardener being photographed too.

Many thanks to Charlie Hopkinson for his beautiful photographs and this interview. Brief bio: Charlie has been a butcher, paint maker, artist, and soldier before he taught himself photography. Based in South London, he spends most of his time on location photographing well known subjects for a wide variety of magazines. Much of his personal work is centred around things that grow or once grew. His gardening hero is Henk Gerritsen, and his bible, is Henk’s Essay on Gardening. Photographic heroes include Jacques Henri Lartigue, and Diane Arbus. You can see more of Charlie’s work at his website, charliehopkinson.com.

To learn more about community and allotment gardens, visit the Therapeutic Landscapes Network website’s Community Gardens page.

Wordless Wednesday, 1/12/11 – Mountain laurel snowcaps

January 12, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Schoolyards should have trees and other living things

January 10, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Andrew H. Wilson Charter School courtyard, New Orleans, LA. Image courtesy of Pavestone Company.

Ironically, as I was preparing to post Amy Lindemuth’s piece on landscapes in prisons last week, I came across an article in Landscape Architect and Specifier News that had a picture of what looks like a rather bleak prison courtyard with no trees or other vegetation, just a two-toned paving grid. ‘How sad,’ I thought, ‘We still have such a long way to go.’ And then I realized that the people in the photo weren’t prisoners, they were children! Children at an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. So here’s my Letter to the Editor (which has since been published in the February 2011 issue, Vol. 27, No. 02, p. 14). As I say at the end of the letter, to me this is an example of failure, not success. Fingers crossed that they print it, and fingers crossed that this type of design is a dying breed.

Letter to the Landscape Architect and Specifier News Editor regarding “Another Brick in the Wall.”

When I first saw the feature image for Bruce Soileau’s article on the new Andrew H. Wilson Charter School courtyard (“Another Brick in the Wall”), I thought I was seeing a prison courtyard, and my heart sank at the huge expanse of paving with no plant material or any other kind of shade in sight. Even inmates deserve some relief from paving, no matter how “interesting” the pattern (and the visual interest of the two-tone pattern here is debatable). When I realized I was looking at a newly designed courtyard for an elementary school, my sadness turned to anger. When a school gets a chunk of disaster recovery money, this is the best they can do? I understand that the school, not the designers, set the program. They wanted their large interior courtyard to be paved “entirely except for four planters that were installed” (of which there are no pictures in the article). What a shame. What an incredible missed opportunity to do something truly green and sustainable – for the planet, and for the children and teachers at this school.

This is New Orleans. How many months of the year will this courtyard be unusable due to extreme heat, glare and danger of sunburn? Even if no other plant material had been used, trees in this courtyard would have provided much-needed shade for people using the courtyard as well as for the building. Trees, in addition to providing green life, reduce the heat island effect significantly.

I wish someone had given the school administrators and the architects and landscape architects (if there were any) Sharon Danks’ new book Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation and Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods before the design program was established. And I wish that someone had pointed them to the Children & Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org) and the Therapeutic Landscapes Network (www.healinglandscapes.org/related-play) for a stack of research on how important access to nature is for people’s health and well-being, and especially for children’s mental, physical and emotional development.

A schoolyard in Europe. Photo by Sharon Danks, www.baytreedesign.com.

The Coombes School in England. Photo by Sharon Danks.

Sure, an interesting permeable paving pattern is preferable to asphalt, but come on. Really? A two-tone checkerboard pattern? Is that truly the best that the designers could come up with? And was there no way to convince the school to reach beyond an all-paved program? Children – all people, really, but especially children – need stimulation. They need access to nature. They need shade! To me, this schoolyard landscape is an example of failure, not success. Unfortunately, it’s the students, teachers and staff who will have to make do with it.

Addendum: I received this comment on February 2nd, which gives hope that things are not quite as bleak as they seem. I’m grateful to the person who commented, and I’m reprinting it in the body of the text here because it’s an important piece of the puzzle:
I was personally involved in the project pictured and have some background about the image in the magazine. It is the result of marketing personnel jumping the gun to produce an marketing campaign based on their products. The article was published about a particular brick used in the courtyard of this New Orleans school. The landscape plan has been designed and is waiting funding. In the upper right there is one of four large planters in the courtyard. Adjacent to the courtyard there is a grassed playyard with large live oak trees. There was even an educational wetlands designed for this area, but was postponed due to funding. There are also 4 additional grass playyards that are all nestled under 100 year oak trees. None of these are pictured because they did not include bricks which were being marketed. This is the result of taking an image of one area of an entire project. With only seeing the one image it is a terrible bleak place, but hopefully after funding it will be as nice as the rest of the playyards. Just wanted to let you all know that there is more to the picture. Thanks.

Color in the winter garden: Beyond trees and shrubs

January 8, 2011 | by Naomi Sachs

Winter in the garden consists mostly of earth-toned hues – browns, tans, buffs, greys – and these do have their subtle charms. But around January, I start to pine for color.

Yes, trees and shrubs can fulfill that need – evergreens, of course, and also trees like Hawthorns, with their bright red berries that persist until spring, and shrubs like red- and yellow-twig dogwood with bark that is striking against a backdrop of snow.

But don’t feel limited to plants. I have one very durable blue metal chair that stays out all winter long, and it brings me cheer. I’ve seen brightly painted garden walls and fences, furniture, pots, sculpture, and all sorts of other non-plant-material garden elements that stand out and provide color between November and April. What about you? What’s “blooming” in your winter garden? Now is the time to gaze out the window and think about where you might want those bright sparks that bring joy and hope on a cold, grey winter’s day.