We know that gardens and green spaces are important for our health and wellbeing, but it turns out that their impact isn’t restricted to simply keeping us healthy. When we have been unwell or injured, gardens can be invaluable in our recovery.
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Modern healthcare is rediscovering the rich heritage of ancient wisdom that dates back to therapies used in medieval monasteries, and even earlier. I love this 900-year-old quote from St Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the leading lights of the early Cistercian monastic order, and a founding father of horticultural therapy: ‘The sick man sits upon the green lawn… he is secure, shaded from the heat of the day. For the comfort of his pain all kinds of grass are fragrant in his nostrils. The lovely green of herb and tree nourishes his eyes… the choir of painted birds caresses his ears… the earth breathes with fruitfulness, and the invalid himself with eyes, ears and nostrils, drinks in the delights of colours, songs and perfumes.’
Community cures
In the community, often through social prescribing, horticultural therapy is rapidly growing – helping people with a wide range of health problems. Thus far, its main beneficiaries are those with mental health problems, learning disabilities and social communication disorders. Well-established for those who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or victims of abuse, it was great to see the profile of this valuable work championed in the Freedom from Torture Garden at last year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
In recovery and rehabilitation, gardening is a source of therapy through pain relief, improved movement and activity, and also in restoring fine motor skills
In some recent research, the charity MIND compared short walks through a garden with walks in a shopping complex. They found that the former improved mental health, whereas the latter made it worse. For patients with moderately severe anxiety or depression, a course of ten weeks’ garden therapy (in the form of a few hours every week working with a qualified horticultural therapist) has been shown to be equivalent in benefit to ten weeks of one-to-one cognitive behavioural therapy. Widely used for people with severe mental health problems such as schizophrenia, it can help reduce their psychotic symptoms and enable their doctors to prescribe lower doses of medication. Furthermore, it slows cognitive decline in people with dementia, and both agitation and the need for sedatives reduced in the evenings after gardening sessions.
It’s only in very recent history that we’ve ‘moved’ indoors and into cities; we have become sedentary and inactive, and disconnected from the natural world.
But it is of huge value for physical health problems too. In recovery and rehabilitation, gardening is a source of therapy through pain relief, improved movement and activity, and also in restoring fine motor skills; for example, after a stroke or in Parkinson’s disease. And as time passes, gardeners’ weight falls and their cardiorespiratory fitness rises. Outcomes in metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, and in vascular problems such as heart disease and stroke, all improve. Moreover, it can embed healthier lifestyle choices regarding exercise and nutrition that might enable us, for the first time, to really invest in preventative healthcare at scale. This comes at a comparatively low cost, and with the potential for a huge economic impact on our spiralling healthcare spend.
Hope in hospitals
The tendrils of hope are also spreading into hospitals: in 1984, a seminal study in Texas revealed that simply seeing green space through a hospital ward window helped patients recover faster, and with fewer complications from gall bladder surgery. A plethora of other studies since then have built on this, confirming what many of us instinctively feel. And these instincts chime with Edward Wilson’s biophilia theory – namely that as a species we have evolved through millennia as outdoor beings, living and working in nature. It’s only in very recent history that we’ve ‘moved’ indoors and into cities; we have become sedentary and inactive, and disconnected from the natural world.
Gardening as a treatment can bring a range of welcome side effects
Happily, all new hospitals built in the UK must now include garden space for patients to benefit from, and on older sites, the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare has launched NHS Forests, planting more than 133,000 trees since 2009 across 412 NHS sites.
Trail-blazing benefits
Hospice gardens can also be a template for the rest to follow, and people may well know of the amazing work done by charities such as Horatio’s Garden and Maggie’s Centres, which create beautiful gardens in medical units to help patients in spinal and cancer units respectively. Already, they have a rich legacy of benefit for those patients, and are blazing the trail for the wider health service.
So, both in good health, and in sickness, the role that gardens and gardening can play in our physical and mental health is immense. Moreover, gardening as a treatment can bring a range of welcome side effects, including maximising local biodiversity, taking small steps to mitigate climate change, localising
our food production and connecting our communities. But its impact could be so much bigger if we, as a society, and especially our policymakers, embrace and support it.