WR: Leah! We’re so excited for you to be offering this workshop, Horticultural Therapy: Composting & Seeding as Metaphor for Healing. So, tell us, what is horticultural therapy?
Leah: I think it’s important to start with differentiating horticultural therapy from gardening being therapeutic. A lot of people may have experienced therapeutic effects with gardening, or horticulture. Like, most people can go out into a garden and find peace.
And, you know, there are the kitschy pillows that say things like…”Gardening is a therapy”, and stuff like that. Which makes sense, right? Because, like so many of us experience, that just feels true. Gardening is a way of communing with nature, and communing with nature is therapeutic. It’s in our blood. It’s in our ancestry. Whether it’s digging your hands into the dirt, forest bathing, whatever…we have a way of being grounded by nature.
And I don't know…you may know this, but the soil microbes, when they get under your fingernails, can have similar effects to antidepressants.
WR: Oh, no way!
Leah:Yeah.
WR: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Leah: It's just like we literally need to be putting our hands in the dirt. So horticulture can be therapeutic, and horticultural therapy organizes that idea into a modality; something that can be replicated, and involve assessment and intervention. The therapeutic effects are the focus and not a secondary effect or happenstance.
So it’s a therapeutic tool that is used with lots of different people, like with people that are in recovery from a serious injury, or with differently-abled folks. It is used a lot with physical and occupational therapy, so you’re getting the functional movement while also the sweetness of tending to something. Tending to a plant.
In the mental health field, it is often used with people in recovery from substance use or with veterans. Personally, I like using it with all kinds of therapy, especially play therapy.
WR: How did you get into horticultural therapy?
Leah: I gardened a lot as a kid with my mom and grandma, and I always found it to be very therapeutic even then. Later, in college, I volunteered at this neighborhood center that had a big greenhouse in a park. They had kids programming, and that was where I did most of my volunteering, and it actually eventually became my job.
The kids that would come to these programs, they were struggling from all kinds of things. Several struggled with gender and identity issues. There were children of refugee families whose house had just burned down. They were just all really struggling.
As part of the program, we were teaching the kids how to install garden boxes in folks’ yards around the neighborhood, as well as tending to an edible garden in the park. And we would plant different fruit trees, and tend to the blackberries. It was so fun. It was a really sweet community. And I could tell that the kids got a lot out of the garden programming. So many of them experienced it as therapeutic like I did.
But I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to know how to get more out of what the kids were experiencing. They were getting a lot out of what we were doing, but they needed even more support. So I started digging around for what that might be, and that’s when I came across horticultural therapy.
I attended the Horticultural Therapy Institute, which is in Denver, but I took four-day courses over the span of two years in different locations. This was in 2015 and 2016.
Through the institute, I got exposure to other people that are doing horticultural therapy. And then I got to put it into practice doing programming at an Atlanta private school.
While I was there, there were several students whose family members died. I partnered with the school counselor and started having a time for the kids to come and tend a part of the garden. They would come and meet with me for half an hour and talk and do some garden things. It became like a memorial garden for their loved ones, and it was just a time to grieve.
WR: And now you have become a therapist yourself. Do you still integrate horticultural therapy into your practice?
Leah: I do! I recently started managing a community garden that is close to my office where I work with kids and teens, so I bring clients there sometimes. And I notice that every time I bring a kid to visit the garden, I have a shift with that client. Something opens up in them, or they have a new sense of wonder. There’s just not the same sense of wonder in the playroom.
I also did a horticultural therapy group for kids this past summer, and they all really seemed to love it. Even if at first they were like, “what are we doing?”, they ended up really enjoying eating the sorrel and the chives right out of the ground. So many of them, they just came alive with wonder. And that's what a garden brings– awe.
Being in the garden, or in nature, brings in your senses in such a big way. And so it connects you with mindfulness because there's just so much, like... Whether it's the sound of the wind in the trees or the birds, or the smell of the herbs or the soil, or like the feel of the plants or the feel of the earth in your hands…it’s really a full sensory experience, and that is grounding.
WR: How about with yourself? Do you still experience the benefits of gardening, or do you apply any kind of horticultural therapy practice yourself?
Leah: Yeah, I mean, when I spend time in a garden, I feel more myself. I feel more grounded. I feel more calm, less stressed.
And...like, I kind of go back to the metaphors nature offers a lot. I think a lot about how, for example, seeds are such a powerful metaphor. I notice for me, I tend to get a lot more out of a self-reflective question when it’s framed through a nature metaphor. Like, to me, it feels really different to ask something like “what seeds am I planting in my life right now?” versus simply, “what do I want more of in my life right now?”. The metaphor contains within it the reminder that whatever I am focusing on or growing requires care, effort or tending. And this idea that it’s all already within me, too–just waiting for the right environment or conditions, or the right tending. It's empowering. And it feels hopeful.
Nature helps me with hoping and believing in the future, which is sometimes hard to do these days. It’s kind of like when during the pandemic and everything was shut down, I saw bees in Freedom Park, like, pollinating the little clover flowers, or getting their nectar from the little clover flowers, and I felt like, oh, it's gonna be okay. Like, nature's still going. We haven't messed it up so much that there aren’t parts of nature still doing what they're doing.
There's peace in nature, and there's a slowness that we need with our fast-paced lifestyles. And there is something really sweet about a practice such as going back to the same place in nature day after day, and noticing what's changed. It connects us.
WR: Thank you for sharing! I love hearing about the ways you have worked with nature to support kids, as well as all the ways you integrate connection with nature into your own life through horticultural practices. You’ve given a beautiful glimpse into what you’ll be offering in your workshop. So who do you imagine would benefit from this workshop, and what do you hope they will take with them after they attend?
Leah: This workshop is for anyone who finds healing and peace in connection with nature–or anyone who wants to! We’ll do some mindfulness practices and self-reflection guided by nature; we’ll get our hands in the soil and some dirt under our fingernails; we’ll plant some literal metaphorical seeds; and perhaps most importantly of all, we’ll build a relationship with nature.
I hope that everyone that attends will leave feeling a little more grounded than when they came; that they’ll feel more open to the possibility of connecting nature in their day-to-day; and that they’ll feel inspired and empowered to sow seeds of connection, or of intentionality and whatever is growing within.
Learn more from Leah!
Sunday, September 14th, from 10 am to 12 pm at Heart Space Holistic!
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