Day: 30 October 2020

Gardens and Gardening Are Good Medicine Take as self prescribed!

 Berkshires, USA in the Spring

It is a balmy Berkshire spring morning— the winter snows of 2002-3 have finally disappeared.  You have just taken a break from your first gardening chores of the spring and are having a glass of water on the porch. The sweet aromatic fragrance, deep brown color, and crumbly texture of rich garden soil has fully captured your senses as it has every spring.  You reflect momentarily on the aspirin bottle you brought with you in case your joints are objecting.  You notice as well that, like other medicines, aspirin contains claims, warnings and instructions for use.

It occurs to you that gardening is easily the best medicine for you. You have heard others proclaim something similar. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, long time and highly regarded landscape researchers, hold the conviction “… everyday nature can make a significant contribution to people’s everyday lives.  Nearby nature can foster well being.” ¹

No aspirin today!   You wonder quietly if you created a prescription label for the act of gardening, what would it proclaim?  Would it be the lengthy hype similar to the “cure-all” medicine peddlers of old?  It is certainly easy for you to imagine some of the things it might espouse.

Gardening – The Fine Print

Gardens are the Universal Medicine!

Indications: For those who need an immediate antidote for mental fatigue—at once therapeutic, healing and restorative!

• Gardening is a restorative therapy, contributing in tangible ways to our physical health.
• Gardening is a meditation, a desperately needed vehicle for reestablishing sanity, and thus restorative to our mental health as well.
• Gardening provides the essentials for joyful celebratory living, and is a source of creative inspiration and expression.
• Gardens provide the context for self-discovery and understanding. They are great teachers of patience, faith, and collaboration.
• Gardens create a sense of place, a celebration of beauty in a chaotic world; they regularly serve as a basis for meaningful social exchange and community building.
• Most of all, gardening generates empathy for other living things and connects the gardener to vital life. Gardening can demonstrate our ability to live in greater harmony with our natural world.

1. Gardening is a restorative therapy, contributing in tangible ways to our physical health.
   Supported by science and our own personal experiences, gardens are known to have a therapeutic and healing influence on our lives, be it for individuals, communities, or our entire precious earth. Though outwardly a simple activity, its implications and results are multi-faceted.  In addition to the welcome physical exertion, gardening reduces stress and promotes healing.

 The Kaplans suggest we need most the “non-demanding quiet fascinations” that nature and gardening supply.  Consciously or not, we realize we need non-threatening and restful places to complement and relieve our anxieties and fatigue.  The more restorative of these environments are amply endowed with natural materials, and provide marked contrast to our daily (work) environments. They feel whole, complete and soothing.

Gardening with nature is well endowed with aspects of quiet fascination.  Flora, fauna, water and the endless play of light and shadow delight and intrigue us.  In addition, nature displays (to those who observe) the multitude of natural processes such as birth and death, growth, decay, predation, succession and even hopeful evidence of survival.

2. Gardening is a meditation, a desperately needed vehicle for reestablishing sanity, and thus restorative to our mental health as well.

 The cycle of gardening, reflecting as it does the cycle of life and death, is a deep metaphor shared by all human beings.  Thus gardens have the potential to convey to us a more profound understanding of this universal cycle and our place within it. We understand the movement of seasons, and the concept of renewal.  There is often an introspective and meditative quality to time spent in the garden.

Gardens go beyond horticultural excellence and taxonomic dexterity, beyond plants and planting.  They embody the opportunity to increase genuine sanity and welfare for those who work in them and view them regularly. In this tension-filled, fear-laden period of human history, creating and maintaining restorative settings has some real urgency, according to the Kaplans.  Since our contemporary lifestyle tends to be centered around technology, our fatigue is more often mental rather than physical.  Gardens directly enhance our recovery from this mental dis-ease.

3. Gardening provides the essentials for joyful celebratory living, and is a source of creative inspiration and expression.

 Gardens give us a sense of joy and abundance. After the basic human necessities of food, shelter, water and air (to which gardens contribute as well), gardens provide three additional components of a fulfilled life:  the opportunity to create something of beauty with our own hands; direct and meaningful contact with the earth and nature; and a locus for informal, gregarious contact with neighbors and friends.  There is great joy in discovering the first blossom on the peas in the spring, tasting the first ripe tomato in summer, harvesting the squash just before frost, and continuing to uncover root crops after snowfall.  The garden returns our labors with bounteous generosity.

Gardens and the environments they support also stimulate us intellectually; they evoke literature and poetry, inspire art and photography, advance a basic understanding and awareness of nature, and introduce concepts of ecology and biology.   As we experience our own creativity and discovery, we feel more deeply connected with our natural environment… and expand our sensitivities.

4. Gardens provide the context for self-discovery and understanding. They are great teachers of patience, faith, and collaboration.

 It might be said that a prime reason for our earthly existence is to better understand ourselves.  This is accomplished not only by self-introspection but also by relating openly and interactively with our world, by understanding our place in it.  Environments—whether natural, social or manipulated—do provide a basis for self-learning. As we monitor our reaction to people, situation and place, we gain a better understanding of ourselves. The Kaplans suggest that this information is more basic to people than money.

Anyone who gardens must develop patience; gardening is an exercise in delayed gratification.  Thus, the practice is about the process as much as it is about product.  As we observe the plants, we develop greater respect for their needs.  It is a participatory process, one in which we learn by doing.  We do get some immediate responses as well, such as watching a plant perk up after we water it.  The ways in which plants respond to our care remind of us the interconnectedness of our own natural systems.

5. Gardens create a sense of place, a celebration of beauty in a chaotic world; they regularly serve as a basis for meaningful social exchange and community-building.

Gardens are one way in which we create a “sense of place.” Psychologist and author Suzanne Langer ² defines place as “space imbued with meaning.”  Successful “places” are often limited in scale, have clear boundaries, and read as a thematic and coherent whole.

Again according to the Kaplans, compelling places are characterized by complexity as well as coherence, legibility as well as mystery.  These seemingly opposite components must be in balance for a garden to be a place of comfort and stimulation.  Those elements that give pattern, order, predictability and coherence to a place provide a context for those elements that add contrast, focus, interest, intrigue and variety.

As gardeners, we are charged with the task of creating or sustaining place.  We attend to the relationships, qualities and conditions that make a space comfortable, intriguing, non-threatening and attention-holding.  An element as simple as a tree can be a focal point, as can a bird feeder, a colorful mass of perennials, a rich screen of foliage.   Anything that can arrest and hold our attention this fast-paced world helps facilitate place.

In addition to providing a place for private meditation, retreat, and self-understanding, gardens also provide a context for meaningful human relationships and connection with others.  Even as we observe our own gardens and our place within it, we recognize in others the same impulse to create, to build, to celebrate life in the gardens they have created.  We join with others to create memorials for important events or persons in our community. As we learn about “place-making”  in our own gardens, we can recognize the importance of creating sustainable and nurturing places in our communities.  Thus, gardening includes a community-building aspect.

6. Most of all, gardening generates empathy for other living things and connects the gardener to vital life. Gardening can demonstrate our ability to live in greater harmony with our natural world.

One of the most significant gifts gardening bequests is the simple discovery that as humans we can live in harmony with our natural surroundings. Human compatibility, the sense that we belong in nature, is essential for our personal rejuvenation. Gardening is an encompassing act of domestication; our ability to domesticate the wild, whether plant or animal, gives us a sense of participation in the larger natural world.

In a period when the world’s attention is on death and dying, there is an accelerating need to be connected to living, healthy things.  We are confronted with  sick air, sick soil, sick lakes, sick streams, sick cities, and sick food.  We need, perhaps desperately, to connect with fresh food, active people, healthy environments and non-toxic materials.  We are gasping for assurance that life will go on.  We must nurture our goal of organically healthy living, and gardening is one very important objective on that path.

 Reflection

The gardening prescription we have contemplated does have a pontificating ring of the medicine man of yesteryear.  Is it possible that these proclamations are true? Oh well you return back to your spring gardening and that’s scrumptious topsoil.

¹ Kaplan, Rachel , Stephan Kaplan and Robert L. Ryan. With People in Mind. (Washington, DC : Island Press, 1998).

 ² Langer, Suzanne. 

Cultivating The Designer’s Mind by Walter Cudnohufsky

As a practicing landscape architect, design educator and founder of The Conway School of Landscape Design, I have developed a rich portfolio of design ideas and discoveries over the years. This tested and cogent process to achieve excellent landscape design is now in print and available for purchase.

Written with longtime collaborator Mollie Babize, Cultivating the Designer’s Mind: Principles and Process for Coherent Landscape Design is uplifting, accessible, practical, and broadly applicable across many disciplines. If you work with the land—as an established landscape architect or emerging landscape designer, master gardener or avocational home gardener, as an architect, civil engineer, planner or builder—our book offers techniques and tools to make one’s design more efficient, functional, environmentally responsible and aesthetically pleasing.

The highly illustrated book will be of particular interest for those studying design and is a comprehensive presentation of the elusive subject of design thinking. It presents a process that will lead to greater design confidence.

Reviews: Landscape Architecture Magazine August 2019 Issue

Ecological Landscape Alliance review 2019

Commonweeder review 2019 Greenfield Recorder review 2019

Cordially, Walter Cudnohufsky,
ASLA Walter Cudnohufsky Associates, Inc.
Landscape Architect & Planner

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