Research

“Can Pastoral Beauty Heal the Mind?” Therapeutic Landscapes in Psychiatric Hospitals

July 4, 2009 | by

Image of Naumkeg Orchard courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

Jane Roy Brown’s article, “Can Pastoral Beauty Heal the Mind” in this year’s Library of American Landscape History‘s annual journal, View, caught my eye last week. In two pithy pages (pp. 11-12), Brown provides an overview of the history of Northern State Hospital in Washington, a psychiatric hospital built at the turn of the twentieth century. The 227-acre hospital campus, as well as the adjacent 720-acre farm, were designed by John Charles Olmsted (yes, son of Frederick Law) and James Frederick Dawson of the Olmsted Brothers firm between 1910 and 1913.

The landscape architects designed several institutional landscapes, and Northern State Hospital was but one example of the ethos of the time in sanitoria and psychiatric institutions, when fresh air, proximity to and contact with nature, and gardening and farming were thought to be not only beneficial to the patient but in many cases a vital part of treatment. Brown says that “…the property is a rare intact example of an institutional landscape that reflected a Reform-era therapeutic approach to illness and disability, emphasizing the spiritual and moral benefits of nature,” (p. 12).

In researching the historic section of my chapter on psychiatric hospitals for Clare Cooper Marcus and Marni Barnes’ Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations, I came across many such examples, and was intrigued by the cyclical nature of how people view, value, and utilize “nature.” Fortunately, we seem to be in another age where people see nature, and the environment (hello, green movement) as something worth working with and fighting for. I do worry sometimes that history will repeat itself and we’ll one day turn out backs on nature again, but I’m hoping that perhaps for once, history will not repeat itself, or if it does, it won’t be for a long, long time.

In addition to the chapter above, here are a few more good resources; some are already on the Therapeutic Landscapes Network‘s site (re-launch of new site coming soon!) and some will be added in the near future:

Barnhart, S., N. H. Perkins, and J. FitzSimons (1998). “Behavioural and Setting Preferences at a Psychiatric Hospital.” Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol. 42, Nos. 2-4, pp. 147-157.

Gerlach-Spriggs, Nancy, Richard Enoch Kaufmann and Sam Bass Warner, Jr. (1998). Restorative Gardens. See especially the chapter on Friends Hospital

Frangipani’s fascinating and beautifully illustrated Flickr post on the Oriental Gardens at Callan Park (or Rozelle Hospital, near Lilyfield, Australia – see this Wikipedia entry for more information).

Hickman, Clare (2006). “Therapeutic Gardens: An Overview of the History of Hospital Gardens in England from 1800.” Bristol University, UK. Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century.”

Kovary, Myra M. (1999). “Healing Landscapes: Design Guidelines for Mental Health Facilities.” Master of Landscape Architecture Thesis, Cornell University.
A similar version of Kovary’s thesis was published with the same title as Chapter 12 of Shoemaker, Candice A. (Ed.) (2002). Interaction by Design: Bringing People and Plants Together for Health and Well-Being. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Press.
If you’d like an electronic copy of this thesis, contact the author: mmk29@cornell.edu.

Neuberger, Konrad R. “Horticultural Therapy in a Psychiatric Hospital: Picking the Fruit.” Note: I found this pdf on the web, and it’s Chapter 34 of ??? Need to do a little digging – no pun intended – to find out what it’s Ch. 34 of. If anyone knows, please help me out!

Regnier, Victor (2002). Design for Assisted Living: Guidelines for Housing the Physically and Mentally Ill. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

And as always, if you know of other good references or resources, please leave a comment.

Nature as Therapy for Hypertension and Other Stress-Related Disorders

June 16, 2009 | by

Image of dogwood leaves courtesy Henry Domke Fine Art

I met several members of the American Society of Hypertension yesterday, and they were intrigued by the idea of nature as an antidote to stress and, specifically, hypertension. As someone who works in this field every day, I forget that there are lots of people who don’t make the connection, other than intuitively (“well sure, every time I work in the garden, I feel better!”), that interaction with nature facilitates good health.

For example, these ASH members were surprised to learn that clinical studies have shown, on a quantitative rather than simply qualitative level, that gardens and other natural landscapes lower blood pressure and heart rate, speed up recovery in hospital patients, increase people’s ability to concentrate and recover from stressful situations, and generally increase people’s sense of well-being. Many of those positive benefits have to do with lowering stress. And guess what one of the leading causes of hypertension is? You guessed it: Stress! Therefore, it stands to reason that interaction with nature could be an excellent prescription for hypertension and so many of its associated illnesses.

Hypertension is the clinical word for high blood pressure; it is a medical condition in which blood pressure is chronically elevated. It is one of the leading risk factors for a slew of other serious health problems, including strokes, heart attacks and other heart failure, arterial aneurisms, and renal failure.

So just as stress sets up a chain reaction that adversely affects our health, interaction with gardens and other landscapes initiates a positive chain reaction that can ameliorate stress and its domino effect. If that’s too simplistic, you can refer to some of the research below for more detailed explanations. And if you have references that aren’t below or on the Therapeutic Landscapes Database’s References page, we’d love your input. And as always, your comments are welcome.


In Sweden, gardens and horticultural therapy are being used clinically to treat patients with stress-related illnesses such as burnout and chronic fatigue syndrome. Here are two articles about these programs:

Clare Cooper Marcus, “Gardens as Treatment Milieu: Two Swedish Gardens Counteract the Effects of Stress.” Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 96, No. 5, May 2006.

Patrick Millet, “Integrating Horticulture into the Vocational Rehabilitation Process of Individuals with Fatigue, Chronic Fatigue, and Burnout: A Theoretical Model.” Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture, Vol. 19, 2009, pp. 10-22.

In almost every article and presentation on the benefits of nature, Roger S. Ulrich refers to reduction of stress. Here are just a couple of examples:


Roger S. Ulrich, R. F. Simmons, B. D. Losito, E. Fiorito, M. A. Miles, and M. Zelson, “Stress Recovery During Exposure to Natural Urban Environments.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 11, 1191, pp. 201-230.

In a blog post from a while back (“How the City Hurts Your Brain – and what you can do about it”), I discussed Stephen and Rachel Kaplans’ Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which is one explanation about how interaction with nature reduces stress. Here’s a good article about that: “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature,” by Mark G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan in Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 12, pp. 1207-1212.

More on scent and memory – Guest post by Wendy Meyer

May 31, 2009 | by

Image courtesy Henry Domke, http://henrydomke.com

Photo by Henry Domke, www.henrydomke.com

Wendy Meyer, a recent MLA graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington left such an informative comment on the last blog post, on scent as an emotional memory trigger, that I thought it was worth printing in its entirety, especially since she provides a link to her thesis, “Persistence of Memory: Scent Gardens for Therapeutic Life Review in Communities for the Elderly.”

Aha, I finally figured out how to post a comment! I wrote my master’s thesis in landscape architecture on this subject–specifically, on using fragrant plants in gardens for elderly people to help conduct reminiscence therapy. There is a ton of new brain science being done on the links between smells, emotions and memories. It turns out that early, emotional autobiographical memories are strongly related to smells, because of the way the brain evolved. I looked at how reminiscence helps older people come to terms with their lives, historic use of scent in gardens as well as history of therapeutic gardens. I also interviewed a group of practitioners for their advice and insights on using scent for therapy in gardens. I got different perspectives from landscape architects who design therapeutic gardens, nurses/therapists who work with elderly populations and horticultural therapists who work in all kinds of settings. One of the recurring themes was the need for everyone involved to work together in creating these gardens–not just garden designers and hospital/nursing home administrators, but the therapy staff, families, patients and (not to be forgotten!) the maintenance staff. I spent two and a half years reading and could have spent lots longer (but I needed to graduate)! You can see the thesis at this link:
http://dspace.uta.edu/bitstream/10106/550/1/umi-uta-1697.pdf. Or if that doesn’t work, I’m sending a PDF to the Therapeutic Landscapes Network website.

When I asked Wendy for permission to post this, and mentioned I might use a rose for the image, here’s what she had to say:

“Roses were probably the flower that came up the most–particularly rugosas, because the hips have a distinctive scent–but also lavender, gardenias, rosemary and lilac. People mentioned a lot of scents outside the garden as well–firs in the Northwest, sagebrush after a thunderstorm in the Southwest, crabapple blossoms in Wisconsin. I have a bunch of plant lists in the appendices–that was one of the fun parts to put together!”

Thanks so much, Wendy!

Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture, 2009 – Hot Off the Press!

March 14, 2009 | by


Well, they’ve gone and done it again. The American Horticultural Therapy Association has published another great volume of the Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture. I swear, the journal alone makes the annual membership at AHTA worthwhile. Some of the articles are very specific to horticultural therapy (no big surprise there), but many of them are broad enough to pertain to the work that landscape architects and other designers do. I think any self-respecting healthcare-focused landscape designer/architect should also be a member of AHTA.


Here are some of the articles in this year’s issue (Volume XIX):

“Integrating Horticulture into the Vocational Rehabilitation Process of Individuals with Fatigue, Chronic Fatigue, and Burnout: A Theoretical Model.”

“Survey of Hort. Therapy Programs in Tennessee.”

“It’s More Than Seeing Green: Exploring the Senses Through Gardening.”

“A New Model for Hort. Therapy Documentation in a Clinical Setting.”

“A Theoretical Perspective for Using Hort. Therapy with Children.”

And then there are the 23 AHTA Annual Conference Abstracts from 2008, many of them compelling enough to make me want to contact the authors. And building on the last blog post about the importance of PLAY, many of these articles and abstracts have to do with connecting children and teenagers with nature. Good stuff!

Gardening for Health – another good article

March 3, 2009 | by

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! 

New research summaries from InformeDesign

January 23, 2009 | by



As I’ve pointed out about a hundred times already, InformeDesign is an excellent resource for designers, researchers, and journalists, and it’s searchable, and it’s FREE. Amazing. Research Design Connections is also fantastic, but you have to pay for a subscription and so it’s harder for me to cite articles from them because I like to be able to post things that people can get to easily. 

As I mentioned in the I Love Lucy posting, I’ve been having trouble keeping up with the news lately – there’s so much of it, and I want to put it all on the blog but there are only so many hours in a day. So here’s another short posting, this time with recent InformeDesign summaries, in no particular order. If you see one that interests you, just click on the title of the summary and you can learn more about it. I’ve also included the full citations here, in case you want to head straight for the originating journal. And thanks, Guy, for the photo!



(Though this paper focuses on preferences for art, much of the findings could be carried over to general aesthetics, including design of outdoor spaces).





Full citations

Blizard, Clifford R. and Rudy M. Schuster (2007). “Fostering Children’s Connections to Natural Places Through Cultural and Natural History Storytelling.” Children, Youth, and Environments, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 171-206.

Doyle, Scott, Alexia Kelly-Schwartz, Marc Schlossber, and Jean Stockard (2006). “Active Community Environments and Health: The Relationship of Walkable and Safe Communities to Individual Health.” Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 19-31.

Haikkola, Lotta, Maria Giuseppina Pacilli, Liisa Horelli, and Miretta Prezza (2007). “Interpretations of Urban Child-Friendliness: A Comparative Study of Two Neighborhoods in Helsinki and Rome.” Children, Youth, and Environments, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 319-351.

Nanda, Upali, Sarajane L. Eisen, and Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani (2008). “Undertaking an Art Survey to Compare Patient Versus Student Art Preferences.” Environment and Behavior, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 269-301.

Song, K.D. (2007). “Evaluating Daylighting and Heating Designs of a Top-Glazed Atrium Space through Physical Scale Model Measurements and CFD Analyses.” Indoor and Built Environment, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 121-129.

Thorson, Sofia, Tsuyoshi Honjo, Fredrik Lindberg, Ingegard Eliasson, and En-Mi Lim (2007). “Thermal Comfort and Outdoor Activity in Japanese Urban Public Spaces.” Environment and Behavior, Vol. 39, No. 5, pp. 660-684.

“How the City Hurts Your Brain (and what you can do about it)”

January 22, 2009 | by

Yoko Shimizo for The Boston Globe


An excellent article by Jonah Lehrer appeared earlier this month in The Boston Globe: “How the City Hurts Your Brain…and what you can do about it.”

As I mentioned a few postings ago, designers – including the “father of landscape architecture,” Frederick Law Olmsted – have known for a long time that cities, though stimulating and full of opportunity, can also be rife with disease, pollution, and other health-defeating problems. Now scientists are examining the effects of the city on the brain, and they are finding what many people intuited all along: “Just being in an urban environment…impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold on to things like memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.” (I think the brain would suffer anywhere when left out on its own, but never mind).

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that even in an overstimulating urban environment, you can counteract the overwhelm that leads to cognitive disfunction by going to a park, or even by paying closer attention to the nature that is all around you (see my post on Urban Naturalism). Lehman discusses attention restoration theory, or ART, coined by University of Michigan professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan more than twenty years ago. Nature elicits what the Kaplans call “soft fascination,” a type of attention that allows for reflection and that is actually mentally restorative rather than taxing. Even just viewing a nature scene – or a tree, or something other than concrete and brick and soot – from the window is beneficial. Now we know why CEO’s always get the corner office! 

To those of us in this field, not much of this is new information, but we’re always thrilled when people stand up and take notice. The Boston Globe! Usually we end up preaching to the converted in tomes like Environment and Behavior (great journal, but not so accessible to those who aren’t designer/environmental psychologist geeks). Lehrer’s article is a great primer on the restorative benefits of nature and bears close reading. For those who want to follow up with further research, Lehrer cites some key studies, and of course the Therapeutic Landscapes Database and Blog have lots more where that came from.

Oh, and here’s a link to one of the articles mentioned by Lehrer: 
“The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature,” by Mark G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan in Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 12, pp. 1207-1212.

So much good news, so little time

January 20, 2009 | by

I’ve been feeling a little like Lucy in Episode 39, “Job Switching,” also known as “the candy factory episode.” So much great news about landscapes for health, I can’t keep up! This is a very good thing, because it means that we’re finally getting somewhere and this whole idea of “therapeutic landscapes” is permeating the public consciousness. But it’s not so good for this solitary blogger! So for the next few days, I’m going to give you short bursts. A few sentences and then the link for further study, if you want. More like twitter than my posts usually are. If I could figure out how to do a “news feed,” of related articles, I would, but I haven’t cleared that technical hurdle yet.

First installment short and sweet. Some great articles about the positive effects of indoor plants:



3. The above paper is summarized nicely in this article (as well as in Sara Snow’s on treehugger): “Do Plants Speed Up Recovery In Hospitals?” on scientficblogging.com. 

4. “The Effect of Live Plants and Window Views of Green Spaces on Employee Perceptions of Job Satisfaction.”

5. “Greener Offices Make Happier Employees.” Press release about the above paper from the American Society for Horticultural Sciences.


Full citations:

Dravigne, Andrea,  Waliczek, R. Lineberger, and J. Zajicek (2008). “The Effect of Live Plants and Window Views of Green Spaces on Employee Perceptions of Job Satisfaction.” HortScience, vol. 43, p. 279. 

Park, Seong-Hyun and Richard H. Mattson (2008). “Effects of Flowering and Foliage Plants in Hospital Rooms on Patients Recovering from Abdominal Surgery.” HortTechnology, October, 18:549-745.

Snow, Sara (2008).”Green Eyes On: Healing and Air Purifying Plants.” treehugger.com, 1/19/09.

News staff (2008).”Do Plants Speed Up Recovery In Hospitals?” scientificbloggin.com, 12/29/08.

“Greener Offices Make Happier Employees.” HortTechnology, ASHS Press Releases, 5/16/08.

Nature is good for us – firsthand knowledge

January 11, 2009 | by


I finally heeded my own advice and dragged myself away from the computer to walk the dogs in the beautiful snow. So glad I did! I feel better, the dogs feel better, and I’ve got some new pictures to post on the blog.


There are so many articles on how and why getting out in nature is good for you (just google “nature is good for you” and you’ll see what I mean). But here’s one that I especially like: “The Benefit of Nature on Nurture,” by Thea O’Connor.


Fellowship opportunity for LA students

January 10, 2009 | by


The Landscape Architecture Foundation‘s Leadership in Landscape Scholarship Program is now accepting applications for its 2009 fellowship and scholarship opportunities. The deadline for the Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design fellowship is soon – January 15th – but if you miss this deadline, it looks like there’s another opportunity with a deadline of 2/15. But don’t take my word for it: See the LAF’s website for more info and the fine print: http://www.lafoundation.org/scholarships/scholarships.aspx. This award is given for research conducted by a graduate student at a leading institution. 


Thanks to Kathy at LAF for this information.
Copyright 2024 © Therapeutic Landscapes Network is a 501(c)3 Organization
Creative Commons Attribution 3 United States License | Legal and Privacy