Sunday, November 18

The healing power of plants

Buehler Enabling Garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden is a great place to take a handicapped friend. This 11,000 square-foot garden demonstrates many of the strategies employed by horticultural therapists, including accessible raised beds and vertical gardens. Chicago Botanic Garden photo by Robin Carlson.

Why do we send flowers to people in the hospital? Or plants to grieving friends?

Because horticulture heals.

Dr. Benjamin Rush published the first reports on the benefits of horticultural therapy in 1798, after he discovered that patients who worked in the hospital food garden recovered more quickly than those who didn't. More than two hundred years later, horticultural therapy is still revolutionizing recovery.

Today, patients convalescing from strokes, accidents or surgery often have to endure painful physical therapy sessions. Retraining muscles and joints is not for the faint of heart, and mentally focusing on a task can make it even more painful. But by disguising the work as a rewarding hobby, pain is often diminished and progress speeded up. A patient who participates in horticultural therapy, for example, might willingly spend an hour pulling weeds or planting plugs in lieu of 10 minutes of monotonous hand-strengthening exercises.

Health clubs use the same approach. Put me on a NordicTrack with nothing to look at but a bleak concrete wall and each step is torture. Add a television set and I'll have several miles under my belt before I know it.

But horticultural therapy is much more than a fancy way to distract people. Caring for plants actually places patients in the role of caregivers, increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence while simultaneously retraining their muscles and improving their coordination. As gardeners, we understand the intoxicating feelings of seeing that first sprout shooting from a seed that we've sown; of admiring a freshly weeded flower patch, and of smelling and tasting the fruits of our labor. Those are intensely gratifying emotions. And to expose people in recovery to those same emotions is also an intensely healing process -- one that can not only reduce stress levels, but that can also give patients a more hopeful outlook on life in general.

Experts are finding that this is true of those suffering from psychological wounds as well as those needing physical healing. One prison, Riker's Island in New York, provides select inmates with an opportunity to work in a rehabilitational gardening program. Time spent in the garden teaches them how to set goals and to accomplish them. It also allows them to give back to their community by donating what they grow to local urban neighborhoods and to develop skills that they can use to gain employment after they've been released.

At the Garden Project in the San Francisco County Jail, therapists use gardening terms as metaphors. "Compost" becomes the lessons learned from past mistakes. "Weeding" equates to pulling out the negative habits, thoughts and associations that led to incarceration. And "transplanting" and "watering" describe life after prison and the need for positive role models and lifestyle choices.

One Texas study followed two groups of inmates. The first was enrolled in a horticultural therapy program; the other group participated in standard programs like trash pick-up, maintenance and community service. The horticulture group showed significant improvement in their self-esteem. But more concretely, they also had a much lower recidivism rate -- 26 percent versus the standard group rate of 49 percent.

Horticulture does make a difference.

In 2001, another study was conducted showing the effects of flowers on senior citizens. The results revealed measurable increases in memory, decreases in depression and an increase in sociability.

"Happier people live longer, healthier lives and are more open to change," said researcher Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Ph.D. "Our research shows that a small dose of nature, like flowers, can do a world of wonder for our well-being as we age."

Even though the active growing season in our area may be over this year, it doesn't necessarily mean that your gardening skills have to hibernate. Consider taking an amaryllis bulb to an elderly friend this holiday season or delivering flowers to the Salvation Army or Harbor House during the dreary days of January. Early in the spring you could organize a seed-planting party at the pediatric ward of one of the local hospitals. Then, before you know it, it will be time to get out into your own garden again and -- not only will you have increased your own sense of well being -- but you'll have encouraged and uplifted some other people along the way, too.

Mollie Uftring developed a green thumb as a teenager working in the perennial beds at Hornbaker Gardens in Princeton, Illinois. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in ornamental horticulture, she worked as a landscape designer in Ohio before returning to Illinois.