Horticultural Therapy Services at the Chicago Botanic Garden
During the last 30 years the Chicago Botanic Garden has been committed to the theory, practice and evaluation of people plant interactions that encourage improved human health and wellbeing. The Garden’s Horticultural Therapy Services program is an internationally known resource for the design and application of plant and nature based programs that assist the health care and human service practitioner to launch and sustain therapeutic indoor and outdoor gardening programs. These programs are adapted to the participant’s functional abilities and interests as well as desired agency outcomes.
All therapy professions are based on providing service that results in a beneficial change in the service recipient. Horticultural therapy uses people/plant interaction as its primary agent of therapeutic change. Horticultural therapy is activity driven. A therapy session consists of therapist and participants engaged with plants or plant products. It is in the process of doing a horticultural therapy activity that the participant experiences opportunities to change his physical, cognitive, and/or psychosocial level of function. It is the therapist’s responsibility to provide activities that have the physical, cognitive, and emotional demands to match the goals of the participants.
Chicago Botanic Garden horticultural therapists have worked with hundreds of healthcare professionals as well as thousands of individuals in their care over the decades. The staff are expert in creating and evaluating plant and gardening activities that are engaging, therapeutic and readily adaptable to a wide range of functional abilities. Depending on the planned outcomes desired by the institution, these activities are modified to support clinical therapies, vocational/educational skill development and/or simply to offer safe, comfortable and engaging leisure activities for participants.
Over the past 25 years the Chicago Botanic Garden Horticultural Therapy Services program has emerged as one of the country’s pre-eminent public service, education and training sites within the field. The Enabling Garden: Creating Barrier Free Gardens, by Gene Rothert, HTR, founder and manager of the program, remains the first choice of those wishing advice on creating enabling spaces. The Buehler Enabling Garden, dedicated in 1999 as the country’s leading example of enabling garden design and programming, won the American Association of Museum’s (AAM) Accessible Design award for 2000. The garden is a mecca for the fast-growing field of health care garden design. A recent evaluation conducted with faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago helped clarify the important role that the Horticultural Therapy Services program has to play in conducting original research. Major research topics, advised by some of the Chicago region’s leading health care practitioners and researchers, will focus on evidence-based design and the impact of horticultural therapy activities on the human health and well being.