The Wisconsin Gardener

cc I have a passion for visiting gardens accessible to people of all abilities and all ages. I've visited garden designed for people using wheel chairs vision impaired, hospital healing gardens and gardens in people's own backyards. I am with Mike Maddox of Rock County UW-Extension. Mike, now I'm bringing it closer to home. I have a dislocated shoulder. This all falls under horticultural therapy, I think. Can we find a therapist for me in this situation? For your shoulder? Very possibly. For maybe not falling down anymore? Let's just take a moment to define what horticultural therapy is. We've been using the term a lot lately but I think we need to provide a little bit of clarity. The American Horticultural Therapy Association defines horticultural therapy as the process in which a medical doctor, a registered horticultural therapist and you as the patient work to achieve some sort of goal for your own improved well being. Strengthening my arm or something in that pattern. Right, in the case of your shoulder instead of going to a physical therapist and just using rubber bands, they would design a program to work on your strength and mobility in your shoulder by doing certain garden tasks. Doing physical exercises with plants. Correct. It would be structured in a way that there would be evaluations to see if you're reaching those goals and improving. Progressing. That is completely different than what I've been doing which is visiting gardens that are accessible to all sorts of people. Right, but there's definitions for that, too. You take the words and flip them around to therapeutic horticulture and you have a totally different definition. Okay. This is what they define as garden spaces and programs in these areas just to engage people outdoors in the landscape getting them connected to plants so they can still achieve that well being. There's no predefined goals. There's no therapist out there measuring anything. They're just programs created to get people to interact with the landscapes around them. So, a garden that's accessible to people in wheelchairs gets them outdoors let's them enjoy the magic of the outdoors. Gardens in hospitals, gardens associated with schools these are all spaces designed just to bring groups of people out into them for engagement. Okay, so that's therapeutic horticulture. Correct, but the definition continues. There's also what's called social horticulture or sometimes called community horticulture. We see this with the Master Gardener program and garden clubs all over. These are opportunities in which a group of people come and maybe they do a garden project at a botanic garden or in a park, or in a community garden and they're doing this task and at the same time, they're talking. They're talking about what's going on in their neighborhood. They're talking about what's going on in their lives. There's that sort of connectivity among the people but there're doing it while gardening. The community benefits and the individuals are also getting therapy just by being together. There's still one more type of definition. This is called vocational horticulture. These are programs designed to teach individuals job skills using gardening as that conduit or maybe they're being led into jobs in the green industry themselves by participating in vocational horticulture programs. So they're learning new skills that they can hopefully use in the field of gardening. For their own independence. You mentioned hospitals. That's one thing that intrigues me. You see a lot more hospitals adding healing gardens to their landscape. They're also seeing the benefits of gardening. There's a lot of research that's been coming out that supports the connection between people and plants and how interacting with green space improves everyone's well being. Something you and I have known all along. Most definitely. So this is why maybe gardening is the number one hobby in the country. And will probably always continue to be. Let's keep it that way.