Horticultural Therapy - What the Heck is It?

I have a decorative stone in my garden that my daughter made for me.  On it there is a little quip:  “Gardeners are plant managers.”  But what is a Horticultural Therapist?

I’d warrant a guess that chances are you don’t know what Horticultural Therapy is.  Likewise, you’ve probably not ever heard the term.

But before I give you a definition, I have a question for you, especially if you like to garden. 

How does gardening make you feel?  Happy, peaceful, satisfied with accomplishments, creative, or maybe just tired?  I suspect that the creator of Horticultural Therapy was an accomplished gardener and recognized the healthy qualities of having a green thumb.

By definition, Horticultural Therapy is a segment of a therapeutic treatment plan that engages a person in gardening and plant-based activities as a means of bringing about improvement in their life.  In short, Horticultural Therapists work with special populations in either gardens or greenhouses to positively enhance their lives. 

Remember back to my earlier question?  How does gardening make you feel?  Gardening usually brings pleasure to the average person; think what it could do for a psychotic patient or a developmentally disabled teenager.  And often times, a positive sense of accomplishment is just what the doctor ordered, but hard to come by with other therapeutic means.  Healing, restorative, and adaptive gardens help to cultivate progress in the lives of people—and the garden produce is only secondary.

Horticultural Therapists receive an extensive education—both Undergraduate and Masters level programs exist.  The training combines agriculture/horticulture courses with behavioral sciences.  Often complimentary fields like gerontology, vocational rehab, mental health, special education, or other similar courses are also studied.

Historically, Hort Therapy goes back over forty years to a renowned private psychiatric hospital, the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.  More recently, in 2004, Dr. Wangari Maatai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because she was instrumental in planting more than 30 million trees in Kenya in the Green Belt Movement.  Dr. Maatai is not a Horticultural Therapist, but her achievements echo the philosophy of horticultural therapy—improving the world for its citizens by plant-life cultivation.

So, you may now be asking, “Why is this my topic for today’s blog?”

The answer is that I am one of the privileged to have a Bachelors of Science degree in Horticultural Therapy.  And, inevitably, whenever I tell people what my education is in, I get that blank stare that tells me that I may as well be talking in a foreign language.  Not many people have heard of the field of Horticultural Therapy, so I chose to enlighten my readers with an explanation.  My degree is from Kansas State University, the college who pioneered the program with the assistance of the Menninger Clinic.  Today there are several other colleges who offer a degree program in the field of Horticultural Therapy.

It is my hope that someday, Horticultural Therapy will be as common as physical therapy or occupational therapy.  And the next time you go to your garden to pull weeds, water, or harvest, please stop and consider your emotional response to gardening.  Yesterday I harvested my first zucchini and the sense of accomplishment was significant.  It feels good, doesn’t it?