| Horticultural Therapy: A Healing Garden |
| Healing gardens help people deal with transition and loss. |
From "Dirt On Gardening"
episode DDOG-111 |
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Topher Delaney is an award-winning designer and environmental artist who knows the power of a garden. At her San Francisco studio called "Seam," she brings together the elements necessary to create healing gardens--sanctuaries where people dealing with change in their lives find strength by connecting with the earth."Healing is a sense of regaining balance," says Delaney. "What gardens do is offer us the opportunity to tend something, to be present in the place."
Courtyard garden at San Francisco's Avon Foundation
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Garden designer Topher Delaney
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Delaney has designed healing gardens and courtyards at hospitals and health centers across the country, including the Carolyn S. Stolman Healing Garden at the Avon Foundation Breast Center in San Francisco. The treatment rooms and waiting room at the center all look out onto the courtyard (figure A) which is planted with medicinal and aromatic plants such as jasmine, lavender and lemon. Information about the plants is on display in framed botanical prints within the center (figure B).
The gardens provide a safe and quiet place for patients to reflect and meditate. As a breast-cancer survivor herself, Delaney has focused her career on crafting these healing spaces that are both visually and emotionally soothing. Her background as a cultural anthropologist provides her with the context for understanding how these gardens may serve the groups and individuals who will use them.
The whole idea of making a garden is that you are connected to the daily, cyclical process of life. A garden 'reattaches' you. It is the natural umbilical cord to the earth.
--Topher DelaneyContinue the online tour in DIY's "Very Special Gardens" series.
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