Main description:

Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical exploration of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. It explores the gardens and gardening provide prevention and restoration mechanisms, while also improving social and health equity via a range of traditional and innovative green space sites and actions.

Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the processes of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to prevent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors determining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethnographic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, ontological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, therapeutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation.

This book provides much needed critical insights toto impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilizing horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of health geography; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environmental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies and health policy.

Contents:

Introduction

Pauline Marsh and Allison Williams

Part I: Boots on: Scoping the cultivated therapeutic landscape

1. Tending more than gardens: Engaging residents in public landscapes to cultivate urban nature

Sara Barron, Kate Lee, Maddison Miller and Emily Rugel

2. Gardening for good in Ontario, Canada: A case study of Hamilton's Victory Gardens

Allison Williams

3. Growing health in local food gardens: Case studies of community, school, and home gardens

Sumita Ghosh

4. The cultivated 'healing garden': Respite and support or lifestyle change?

Esther Veen and Karolina Doughty

5. Mental health outcomes associated with gardening: A scoping review

Selma Lunde Fjaestad, Jessica L Mackelprang, Takemi Sugiyama and Jonathan Kingsley

Part II: Companion planting: Cultivating human wellbeing

6. Critically exploring public realm greenspace as a therapeutic landscape and the role of Green Social Prescribing

Jessica Thompson, Michelle Howarth, Michael Hardman and Penny Cook

7. Creating a therapeutic garden for people with Huntington's Disease and other neurological conditions

Josephine Spring

8. Green places in red spaces: Broadening understanding of therapeutic gardening within rural Australia

Amy Baker, Ali Aguilar and Ben Sellar

9. Health and wellbeing benefits of therapeutic gardens and gardening activities for older people living in residential aged care settings

Theresa L Scott

Part III: Dig Deep: expanding and enriching the cultivated therapeutic landscape

10. Environmental place-making by the 'out of place': Migrants building connections to new landscapes through structured conservation activities

Pauline Marsh, Suzanne Mallick, Dave Kendal and Renae Riviere

11. Eradicating malnutrition through small-scale, diverse and local food production

Bruce French and Anthea Maynard

12. Nurturing Soil-adarities: Growing multispecies justice in therapeutic landscapes

Bethaney Turner

13. Tending the wilds inside: Cultivating healing at the unruly edges of the garden

Alice McSherry and Robin Kearns

14. Conclusion

Horti-cultural geographies: Situating the garden as an assemblage of health and wellbeing

Ronan Foley