Intuitively, this is a healing garden.
Scientifically, this is a healing garden.

Heart and science seldom align so precisely.

How do Healing Gardens work?
❤ The research story
❤ Science
❤ Heart and spirit
❤ Healing garden design
❤ Your own healing garden
Contact me for more information on Healing Gardens.

The Healing Garden experience
Healing-gardens provide a particular type of experience in the landscape.

It is the experience of nature that heals.

Nature heals when it is comfortable, safe, familiar and gently distracting. It heals when it engages our senses; it heals by immersing us in beauty.

Why aren't all gardens healing? Because not all gardens provide the restful, safe, familiar experience that allows healing to take place.

Gardens that are challenging, “different,” adventurous, stimulating, and exotic may be interesting and beautiful, but they are not healing.

The research story
Back in 1984, researcher Roger Ulrich applied science to this question: Can looking at nature help people heal? The answer is yes.

In a rigorously designed study, he analyzed the hospital records of gall bladder surgery patients. Half these patients had rooms overlooking a grove of trees, while the other half had views of a brick wall.

People with views of nature got out of the hospital sooner, had fewer complications, and needed less pain medication.

Conclusion: Looking at nature helps people to heal.

Many, many studies have confirmed and expanded on these findings, while others have tried to discover the more elusive question of why. Why does nature heal? And how exactly should a garden be designed to maximize the healing effect?

Skip to Your own Healing Garden

Science
The primary healing mechanism is stress relief.

The intricate mind-body connection is nowhere more apparent than with stress. Stress interferes with our body’s ability to heal: it impairs immune function, raises blood pressure, restricts blood flow to injured areas, and disrupts our neuroendocrine system.

Illness and injury are associated with stress, such as pain, anxiety, isolation, depression, and helplessness. Natural beauty eases each of these in different ways. For example, gardens designed to create escape reduce feelings of confinement.

Gardens with life reconnect us to the larger world; gardens with engaging motion, scent, and texture direct our attention away from pain and anxiety.

Heart & Spirit
All science has to say is more simply understood by the heart: in nature’s beauty, we lay down our burdens; we open up and allow peace to enter. When our hearts are comforted, our bodies can begin to heal.

For many, the heart’s opening leads to contact with Spirit. Symbols of the sacred in a Healing Garden provide a focus for prayer, connection and peace. Garden space charged and guided by the sacred may provide the most powerful healing of all.

Skip to Your own Healing Garden

Healing Garden design
Healing Gardens invoke serenity, peace, relaxation, and ease. Every feature supports these essential qualities. Healing Gardens also providing gentle engagement of the senses and a feeling of connection to life and the larger world.

Healing Garden design must accommodate the limitations of illness and injury. For example, paths must be smooth and level, perhaps with handrails; seating must be readily available; plants must be within easy reach.

Healing Gardens must provide shelter from glare and wind. Multiple factors must be addressed and integrated for the garden to work as a healing, functional space.

Your own Healing Garden
Hospital or other public Healing Gardens must accommodate all levels and types of illness, multiple variations in aesthetics, and all forms of spiritual practice.

But your personal Healing Garden is yours alone. Your own Healing Garden design arises from your needs, your own sense of ease and beauty, your appreciation of nature, and your own connection to the sacred.

Your healing garden could have curving paths and lush plantings, or it might have an open feel with clean, simple lines.

It could honor the Four Directions, or include a figure of St. Francis, or a Buddha, or a cross. It might be a bright hummingbird garden outside the bedroom window, or it might have many sheltered nooks where you could sit with a beloved pet.

It would reflect your heart's peace, in whatever form that takes ...

Contact me to have your own healing garden.

These gardens may ~ or may not ~ provide the experience of a healing garden.
•	Medicinal garden showcase herbs and other plants used in traditional or alternative remedies.
•	Horticultural therapy gardens provide the opportunity for people of all abilities to cultivate flowers, vegetables, herbs and other plants.
•	Meditation gardens provide a serene setting and a place and focus for prayer and contemplation.
•	Therapeutic gardens are designed to accommodate specific healing modalities, such as yoga, physical therapy, massage, hydrotherapy, or other healing practices.

The Healing Garden brochure presents the contents of this webpage as an illustrated brochure. Contact me for a sample brochure, or to find out more about Healing Gardens.

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