Healing Garden « Therapeutic Landscapes Network

Alzheimer’s Awareness Perennial Garden

March 25, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Better Homes & Gardens has teamed up with the Alzheimer’s Association to offer an exclusive Alzheimer Awareness Perennial Garden to help champion Alzheimer’s research and programs.

The collection of five perennials (echinacea, aster, salvia, phlox, and sedum) in whites and blues creates a beautiful, fragrant display that also attracts butterflies, all while raising awareness about and funding for Alzheimer’s disease.

The Alzheimer’s Association receives 10% of the gross sales from all Alzheimer’s Awareness Perennial Gardens (which sell for $99.95) to support research and services in communities nationwide for people touched by Alzheimer’s and related types of dementia. Recipients get a personalized gift card, planting instructions, and a planting plan.

Nice idea, right? Thanks to Jasmine’s Blog for blogging about this first! As she so eloquently put it, “Not only does the garden raise funds for the fight against Alzheimer’s, but part of the beauty of the concept is the stress-reduction offered by the pastime of gardening. The Alzheimer’s Association hopes that some of the 10 million unpaid caregivers in America will find relaxation through gardening. The kit also makes a beautiful tribute to a loved one.”

The Importance of PLAY

March 11, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Did you know that there’s a National Institute for Play? (www.nifplay.org). How cool is that? There’s been a lot of talk lately about play: Its importance not only for early childhood development (which is very important), but for people – and animals, too – of all ages. The new book by Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan called Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul has been getting a lot of press, and for good reason. We need play, and just as Richard Louv uncovered that kids are not getting outdoors enough in Last Child in the Woods, we are not playing enough, either. So, if we’re suffering from nature-deficit disorder and play-deficit disorder, wouldn’t the perfect antidote be some outdoor playtime?

A lot of play does occur outdoors – in “wild nature,” in backyards, in playgrounds, even on sidewalks and cul-de-sacs. When people think of “therapeutic landscapes,” they often imagine a quiet, contemplative healing garden with a bench and a fountain and pretty flowers. And this is absolutely one example of a restorative landscape. But a landscape for health – a landscape that facilitates health and well-being – can be so much more. Under this broader definition, any outdoor space that allows and encourages play would be a landscape for health.

I’ve recently come across a slew great websites, blogs, and articles about play and playgrounds, so this seems like an appropriate post to list a bunch of them:

National Children & Youth Garden Symposium, July 23-25 at the Cleveland Botanical Garden in Ohio, sponsored by the American Horticultural Society. Sign up now (and please take notes so you can report back to us)!

Of course, the Children & Nature Network has great information and resources about getting kids active outside, as does the National Wildlife Federation’s Green Hour.

The Grass Stain Guru is Bethe Almeras’ brand-new rockin’ blog. Check it out for a great list of other play-friendly sites (I won’t list all the ones she does – just go take a look). Bethe, I’m going to get you on here for an interview one of these days!

Kaboom, a national non-profit organization that empowers communities to build playgrounds. Also a great resource for news and information about getting kids outside to play.

ASLA has a new Professional Practice Network called Children’s Outdoor Environments, chaired by Jena Ponti, ASLA.

The Krasnoyarsk Playground Project: A project to build a new playground in the birth home of Alex Griffith (now living with his adoptive family in Forest Hill, MD). Alex took this on as his Boy Scout Eagle Scout project after reading his adoptive father’s journal of their experience in Russia. “The journal mentioned a playground at Hospital #20 in great disrepair. The playground had one rusty swing with a rotten wooden seat, a sandbox mostly covered in dirt and mud, and a small gazebo with a picnic table.” Alex spent six months researching and planning the project and has gotten a huge amount of support. Very inspiring!

Playground Builders (www.playgroundbuilders.org), a non-profit organization devoted to building playgrounds in war-torn countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West Bank and Gaza.

SOL, or Sequential Outdoor Learning Environment, was developed by Tamara M. Vincenta of Artemis Landscape Architects as a sequence of outdoor spaces designed to meet the needs of children and families living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Tamara began this project for her Healthcare Garden Design Certification at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and she has created something really beautiful and powerful from it.

Learning Landscapes (“Building Community Through Play” – www.learninglandscapes.org): A project with The University of Colorado Denver and the City of Denver to “connect the design and construction of urban public spaces with healthy initiatives. Since 1998, in partnership with Denver Public Schools, we have transformed 48 neglected public elementary school playgrounds into attractive and safe multi-use parks tailored to the needs and desires of their neighbors and communities.”

Robin Moore’s Natural Learning Initiative. Moore’s book Plants for Play is one that I refer to again and again.

If you can get a back issue, Landscape Architect and Specifier News had a great issue devoted to play in October of 2008 (Vol. 24, No. 10), even with articles on playgrounds in healthcare facilities.

“Working in the Margins: A non-traditional approach to the practice of landscape architecture creates a much-needed playground in a women’s prison.” by Daniel Winterbottom, ASLA Landscape Architecture Magazine, December 2007, Vol. 97, No. 12, pp. 38-47. This article is about the construction of a playground at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York.

“Reclaiming Outdoor Space for the Digital Generation,” by Helle Burlingame (of the Kompan Institute), Landscape Architect and Specifier News, December 2008, Vol. 24, No. 12, pp. 28-30.

Most of these references are about kids, but play is important for us grown-ups, too. If you have some great resources about the benefits of play in the outdoors for people over the age of 12, I’d love to add them to the list. Anyone out there have stuff specific to seniors? That, too, would be great. Submit comments and I’ll add them here or in another blog post. Please and thank you!

Thanks also to Guy for the great picture of E. at Storm King Art Center.

Forcing spring

March 8, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Image from House Beautiful, 2008

It’s the third warm, sunny day here in the Hudson Valley, and it really feels like spring. Today I celebrated by cutting some stems from our giant forsythia hedge to force indoors. Even though forsythia and magnolia are three of the earliest spring-blooming shrubs (but later than witch hazel – see this post), we’ve still got a few weeks before they really burst into full glory. By taking cuttings and bringing them inside, you can trick trees and shrubs into thinking spring is further along, hence the term “forcing.” I actually could have done this weeks ago, but I always forget! You can force lots of other shrubs and trees, too, including azalea, flowering quince, pussywillow, witch hazel, serviceberry, redbud, rhododendron, beautybush, crabapple, and other fruit trees such as cherry, apricot, pear, and apple. To see some really gorgeous examples, check out this blog post from Habitually Chic: “Forcing Spring.”

Forcing trees and shrubs is also a nice idea in the healthcare setting, particularly in long-term care facilities like nursing homes and hospices. Think how nice it would be in a place where residents have been cooped up indoors all winter, if the horticultural therapist or another health care worker or a family member took some cuttings and brought them indoors for a little spring preview. Or better yet, went with the residents on a “field trip” to prune a few branches on the grounds. Most long-term care facilities have flowering trees and shrubs, and as long as they are pruned carefully and not too overzealously, no one will miss a few branches here and there. If you are letting residents help, make sure to oversee the use of sharp tools, and of course no matter who’s doing the cutting, make sure to prune so that the actual tree or shrub isn’t harmed. Here’s a good article from About.com, that tells you when and how: “Forcing Spring Flowering Trees and Shrubs.” A bouquet of twigs, then buds, then flowering branches becomes a great conversation piece and provides that joyful anticipation of spring’s arrival.

Of course, people force bulbs, too. Paperwhites and hyacinths are the most popular two, but other spring bulbs work as well. Here’s a good article about that from About.com: “Forcing Flowering Bulbs for Winter Color.”

Planting the Healing Garden: Growing Your Own Bird Seed

March 6, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Image of prairie warbler courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

Not much time for blogging lately, but here’s a good article about planting flowers that will attract birds into your garden. And if they don’t eat it all while it’s “on the vine,” you can harvest to feed the birds later. “How to Grow Your Own Bird Seed in the Garden.” Enjoy, and the birds will, too!

Gardening for Health – another good article

March 3, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Image courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

Twitter can sometimes be a supreme distraction, but it can also send good articles my way, including this one, “Gardening for Health.” It’s old (2000), and repeats a lot of the same stuff I and others have been saying again and again, but there’s a personal component to this piece that – in my opinion – makes it worth sharing. I hope you agree!

Sorry to not be keeping up with the daily blog postings. Work with the web designer on our “new improved” website for the Therapeutic Landscapes Network is progressing, and it’s taking a lot of my attention these days as we make decisions about images, layout, features to add to the site that aren’t there now (like a search feature – progress at last!). If you have any thoughts on what you like about the existing site (www.healinglandscapes.org) and what you would really like to see different with the new site, I’d love to hear from you. The TLN will continue to provide all of the same information (plus more!), but in a juicier, more accessible, easier-to-search format. Think organic peaches rather than bran cereal. Above is one of the images that will be in our homepage slideshow. We’re shooting to launch at the end of this month, so get your comments and ideas to me soon!

Thanks to twitterbo for “tweeting” this!

Planting the Healing Garden: Ornamental Grasses

February 26, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

This and other images for this post courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

It’s a balmy 41 degrees here in the Hudson Valley today. I’m not being sarcastic! Anything over 40 degrees is a welcome change, and it’s sunny to add…hm, what’s the opposite of adding insult to injury? Icing to cake?

Anyway, it was warm enough for me to get out and garden for the first time in months, and it felt really good. Not much to do yet, but it is the time to cut back any perennial stalks that you left up for the winter for vertical interest and birds, and it’s also time to cut back your ornamental grasses, which is what I did today. Note to self: Next fall, plant lots of bulbs amidst the grasses so that something green and colorful will be coming up after the grasses have been cut back and before they start to grow in again. More on this in a minute.

Ornamental grasses are a wonderful plant for any garden, including the healing garden. Many people think that a “healing garden” has to have medicinal plants. Not necessarily so! While herbs are certainly great – for actual medicinal use, or as symbols of healing, or just because they smell good and are therefore a delight to the senses – many more healing gardens don’t have any medicinal plants at all, or they have a mix of herbs, vegetables and fruit, trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and any other kind of plant material that seems appropriate for the intended user (the technical term for the person who will be enjoying the garden) and the space.

Here are some reasons why I think ornamental grasses are ideal for healing gardens:

1. They are beautiful! Aesthetically speaking, ornamental grasses really do it for me. So reasons #1-6 all have to do with beauty.

2. Color: Who can resist the bright and rich greens, bronzes, tans, and even reds of grasses, a constantly shifting display of color throughout the year? From the moment they emerge from the ground to when they get cut back in the spring, grasses put on a show of sometimes subtle, sometimes stop-in-your tracks color variation.

3. Play with light: If you’ve ever seen bright-red Japanese bloodgrass (Imperata) in summer or copper little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium, above) in autumn backlit by the sun, you have experienced a thing of true beauty. Sometimes it’s the foliage that gets highlighted, sometimes the flowers, and sometimes both; when you’re thinking about where to site grasses, keep in mind where the light comes from; backlighting can have a really dramatic effect.

4. Movement: Most grasses are very light and airy, and therefore catch the slightest movement of air. There’s something enchanting about seeing grasses dancing and shimmering in the breeze.

5. Seasonal interest: Most grasses offer almost four whole seasons of interest. There’s about a month in the early spring when they get cut back (hence the note to self about bulbs to fill in the gaps), but other than that they put on a great show year-round with changing colors of foliage and flowers, and with texture as well. Like evergreens but with more variation, they provide a kind of structure and continuity in the garden as other plants around them appear, grow, bloom, fade, and go dormant again.

Other great reasons to use grasses:

7. Sound: Many ornamental grasses make a rustling sound when moved by the breeze, bringing an element of sound into the garden. That gentle “ssshhh” adds another layer to the sensory experience, and can even stand in for visual elements in gardens for the visually impaired.

8. Critter-proof! Whether you’re battling squirrels, deer, Japanese beetles or any other kind of pest, grasses are pretty tough. Most animals (other than my dogs – they love to chew on some of my grasses!) don’t like them.

9. Low maintenance: As mentioned above, most ornamental grasses are pretty good at fending for themselves. Other than being cut back in the spring, they don’t need the pruning, staking, deadheading, raking, etc. that we have to do for our other beloved garden inhabitants.

10. Good in containers. Grasses do well in pots and other containers, making them excellent candidates for small-space, rooftop, and other types of container gardens. They can act as nice vertical and or/softening accents, they are often drought- and wind-tolerant, and they (usually -see below!) get along well with their neighbors.

Caution Caveat: A few species of ornamental grasses (especially pampas grass) have very sharp blades (I guess they don’t call them blades for nothing); if you’re using grasses for a children’s garden or another space where people might grab hold or have to brush past, make sure to plant the kinder, gentler, touch-friendly species.

Also, a few species of ornamental grasses do not make good neighbors; they can be a garden nuisance (Hakonochlea and Stipa tennuissima, for example) or even a threat to native grasses and other flora (especially pampas grass, runner bamboos, and varieties of Miscanthus in some parts of the country). So whether it’s your own garden and especially if it’s a garden for a client, do your homework: Make sure you’re not saddling yourself or someone else with a lovely but unruly beast! Here are a couple of articles to start you off: “Native and Invasive Ornamental Grasses” and “Bad Boys of Ornamental Grasses.“

Oh, and one more thing: Here’s an interesting article on caring for ornamental grasses – turns out it depends on whether they are really grasses (vs. sedges or rushes). Thanks to gardenmentor for sending me the link on twitter!

Royal Society of Medicine Conference: Therapeutic Environments

February 23, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Spotted parsley image courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

Thanks to the folks at the Royal Society of Medicine for letting us know about their upcoming

“Therapeutic Environments” conference, on Thursday, May 7 in Birmingham, U.K.

Here’s the scoop:

The aim of the conference is to introduce health professionals to the history, practice, range and clinical effectiveness of therapeutic communities. These are environments in which people of all ages are helped to work through emotional, and sometimes physical, trauma that has affected their ability to live productive and creative lives. Many repeatedly engage in self-defeating and damaging behaviour, and this approach enables them to find new and more successful ways of engaging in social relationships with others. It has application in a wide variety of problem areas, from emotional and behavioural disturbance in children and young people, to addiction and adult mental illness.

The Darzi Report, advocating high quality services for people requiring care in the National Health Service, argues that patients should have “a greater degree of control and influence” over their care, “making services fit for everyone’s needs”, and “care that is personal to them”. Therapeutic Communities do exactly this, in a variety of settings.

Planting the Healing Garden: First Signs of Spring

February 19, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Where I live in the northeast U.S., winter can get a little tiresome after awhile. Sure, it’s nice to pore over garden catalogs and watch the birds and the falling snow from the warmth of the house, but around February I’m done with shoveling and long underwear and root vegetables, and I start to look for signs of spring, thinking please, tell me winter isn’t going to last forever!

For me, witch hazel (Hamemelis spp.) is one of the earliest and most wonderful spring harbingers. I blogged about this last year in one of my first posts (see this one, too, for more) and this year she’s doing it again, this time maybe even a little earlier, and still under a blanket of snow. Tiny little red buds appeared on the spare tan-colored branches about two weeks ago, and they have slowly unfurled to provide some much-needed color in the dreary end-of-winter landscape, as well as fragrance and the promise that spring will, indeed, come again. Different witch hazels bloom at different times: My ‘Jelena’ blooms at least a month earlier than my ‘Arnold’s Promise,’ whose fragrant blooms look like shredded Forsythia blossoms. A friend just turned me on to the New Jersey Botanical Garden, which apparently has a wonderful witch hazel collection. I sense a field trip coming on.

Some other early-spring bloomers ’round these parts are blue Siberian squills (Scilla), pictured above, which poke through last year’s fallen leaves around the same time as the skunkweed; blue snow glories, or glory of the snow (Chionodoxa); Iris reticulata; and snowdrops (Galanthus). I’m actually not sure if snowdrops’ common name is for the whiteness of the blossom or the fact that they often push through the snow to bloom, as you can see in this lovely photo from Anette Linnea Rasmussen, but regardless, they sure make for a welcome change.

And of course, Crocuses! Remember that Joni Mitchell song, Little Green: “There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow…” Curious about what other plants give people hope, I polled my network on twitter, and sure enough, Crocuses were the most popular early-spring bloomers. For perennials, Hellebores (also called Lenten rose for the bloom’s coinciding with Lent) were a favorite. And what about the rest of the country? In Maryland, the pussywillow is one person’s favorite, and a little south of there, in upstate South Carolina, Prunus mume does the trick. This photo by was taken in mid February, but they can bloom even earlier (though they do sometimes get damaged by frost).

Prunus mume ‘Rosemary Clark.’

In the Pacific northwest, primroses are the spring harbinger, as well as by Daphne odora – my Daphne blooms much later, so I don’t think of it as an early-spring plant, but I’m glad it is for somebody – the intoxicatingly fragrant blossoms must produce a Pavlovian like response up there in Seattle.

One person responded that catnip was their favorite spring plant because as soon as its little green shoots start to emerge from the soil, the cats find it, get stoned, and frolick about. Now that’s spring fever! In Florida, it’s Viburnum and Hippeastrum. And in Los Angeles, though I would have thought it wouldn’t even matter, people still do like to mark the change of seasons. For some Angelinos, Freesias mean spring; for others, it’s miles of bright orange California poppies blanketing everything. Here’s a photo I took from the airplane in early March last year. No, the hills are not on fire, they are abloom with poppies.

And in case you want more inspiration, here’s a nice publication by Iowa State University Extension, Early Spring Blooming Perennials. So, dear readers, what about you? What plants help you get through those last few weeks of winter? Add a comment so we can see and take notes!

Dumpster Gardens

February 18, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Who says you need a yard for your garden? Oliver Bishop-Young has thought of – and implemented – some very creative uses for dumpsters (called skips in the U.K.), including gardens. Click HERE to see more great examples including lawn, water garden, and swimming pool. Now that’s dumpster diving I can get into! Thanks to James Westwater for turning me on to this.

Sensory Gardens

January 27, 2009 | by Naomi Sachs

Fountain at Carolyn S. Stolman Healing Garden, San Francisco, CA

Ever since someone contacted me looking for information on gardens for the blind, I’ve been meaning to write a post about sensory gardens. I’ll write more about this subject soon, but for now here’s a nice article from the Washington Post to get you started. Above is an image of a lovely interior courtyard at a cancer care center in San Francisco designed by Topher Delaney. The courtyard has a couple of bubbling fountains and a variety of scented plants that are are also symbolic for their use as medicinal herbs for treating cancer. Note that because cancer patients are so sensitive to smell, it’s best to use plants that release their scent most when touched (like lavender and thyme) rather than something like jasmine that might overwhelm.

“Garden Beauty That the Eye Can’t Behold,” by Joel M. Lerner for the Washington Post (12/20/08, p. F05) article about sensory gardens – gardens that delight beyond sight; some nice ideas for plants and water features that stimulate the senses.