Here’s a new article written by my colleague, friend, and mentor Clare Cooper Marcus, who serves on the board of the Therapeutic Landscapes Resource Center and is Professor Emerita at the Departments of Landscape Architecture and Architecture at the University of California Berkeley. Click HERE to link to the article in Contact Magazine (“Trends: Healing Gardens,” in Contract Magazine, 10/06/08).
If you’re new to the subject of “healing gardens,” this is a good introductory article with some pithy points about where we’re at now as well as where we came from and where this all might be going. Clare touches on many key issues, such as qualities that make a successful healing garden, patient-specific gardens (gardens constructed with evidence-based design (EBD), where research on specific populations is used to design gardens that have the most benefit for that population).
And if you’re an old hand at this growing and exciting field, you may want to read this thoughtful article anyway; Clare articulates many of the talking points that we get asked on a day-to-day basis about “what it is that we do.”