Gardening, plants and nature connection offer a host of benefits including better mood, reduced depression symptoms, pain, anxiety and stress, and increased physical fitness, as documented in a growing evidence base.
But these benefits are not accessible to everyone and can be particularly inaccessible to people with defined health, care, or support needs, who are often those who have most to gain from gardening and connecting with nature. Some of the barriers to enjoying gardening’s many health benefits include garden layouts that don’t accommodate physical or cognitive difficulties, lack of initial support to attend a service, and support workers/practitioners without mental health training, People with identified needs, such dementia, a mental health diagnosis, reduced mobility or learning disabilities are likely to have reduced access to the outdoors, and to garden spaces and activities, despite the evidence being clear that the benefits they experience can have many positive impacts for recovery and long-term health and wellbeing. To enable people to get maximum benefit and unlock the many therapeutic effects that gardens and gardening activities can offer requires expertise in therapeutic and traditional horticulture, accessible and adaptive garden design, programming, and health and care skills to tailor services to peoples’ needs.
Our work with therapeutic horticulture practitioners, and directly with beneficiaries, helps provide the skills, information, expert knowledge, confidence and new ideas to ensure the people who need it most can benefit from excellent garden spaces and activities.
Therapeutic horticulture can be used for:
- recovery/healing,
- rehabilitation and
- prevention,
but requires specialist knowledge and training to provide maximum benefit.
Adherence: people attend therapeutic horticulture programmes very consistently. This high adherence rate compares with low levels in other treatment regimes, so offering an effective and efficient, cost-effective route to recovery and preventative benefits.
Side effects and overdose: there are no known side effect or overdose risks related to therapeutic horticulture.