Garden Route Therapy

Tree of Assets

My fall season started while at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph, first coordinating a five day horticultural therapy practical training, directly followed by the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association conference and annual general meeting.  Magnificent golden days enriched this flurry of activity.

The Home Farm Horticultural Therapy Practical Training was hosted at the Julien Project, a charitable organization using social and therapeutic gardening on the Ignatius Jesuit Centre property.  Seven students, from different parts of Ontario and even an American visitor, came to the Project for an intense week of hands on learning.  The site was ideal in that it provided a  space to work directly with a diversity of populations in both a protected courtyard and field production plot in the community garden.  There were lots of opportunities for experimenting with various activities, including wreath making, vegetable harvesting and creating seed mosaics and then a chance to debrief as a group the experience.

We also had the chance to visit a range of exemplary sites,  from hospitals to farms, using  gardening and nature for health promotion.  The context and scale was always different but overall, students were most blown away by the passion of the individuals working at all these places.

For me personally, it was a joy to be able to share much of what I have acquired since I started on my own horticultural therapy journey and to introduce students to the Julien Project, a site where I have gained so much by volunteering with program delivery and now on the Board of Directors.  The Julien Project has a vision to be a national teaching site for therapeutic gardening and horticultural therapy and the education week launched that work.  It was also a great pleasure to work with Christine Pollard and Sharon Stewart, my teachers and mentors, to offer this program.  The generous spirits of the students who participated made this an invaluable experience for us all.  Thank you to all the risk takers…

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I also sit on the Board of the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association and was excited that the location of this year’s conference would allow our members to experience the Ignatius Jesuit Centre and also be introduced more fully to the Julien Project.  It was great to see how many new people were in attendance wanting to learn about this field and get connected.  The Julien Project had a place to make a presentation at the conference about our process as a new organization building  towards becoming sustainable, fitting with this year’s larger environmental theme.  A reception held at the courtyard garden welcomed participants into this peaceful space.

On the Sunday, I made my own presentation about my area of passion and experience, children and youth and therapeutic horticulture.   I wanted to create an interactive environment to explore the current context around gardening for young people and the potential role of therapeutic horticulture in this work.  I believe their is a role to ensure that health promotion is more strongly incorporated and that the recognized health benefits move beyond the realm of obesity prevention.  It felt appropriate to be having a lively discussion in our own outdoor classroom.

*Photo credit: Margaret Nevett for CHTA presentation capture (above)

Recommendations for the Horticultural Therapy Community

*An on-line add on to the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association members’ newsletter.  You are invited to comment and share your favorite HT related books and research.

November/December 2009 Edition

Defiant Gardens:  Making Gardens in Wartime
Author: Kenneth I. Helphand
San Antonio: Trinity University Press (2006)

Fascinating online extension available at http://defiantgardens.com

“Would you be so kind as to send me some flower seeds?…I want to cover the unsightly earth with verdure (41).” –a WWI soldier’s special request in a letter home

An appropriate selection in the month of Remembrance Day, this historical record provides insight into the significant role of gardens in challenging times.  Helphand’s garden research, related specifically to war, focuses on the first half of the twentieth century.

Where do we see defiant gardens in our own communities at this time?  Why do these spaces often thrive against all odds?   What is the role of gardens in peace building and healing?

Last week with the Children’s Garden and Exploring Toronto Programs was all about seeds as we spouted in jars and egg carton cups, scavenged for seeds in the garden and shook our seed shakers.  Ruth Heller’s book The Reason for a Flower was certainly a helpful tool with the colorful illustrations to guide us through the process.

Since returning to work I have been loading up my bicycle with supplies and heading to different City of Toronto community centers to deliver garden/nature activities to camp children.  Together we’ve been mixing seedballs and compost tea, sprouting snacks, learning about red wigglers, transforming into butterflies, playing fancy flower bingo and carefully observing pollinators at work.  I’ve especially enjoyed sharing story time with The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone (Timothy Basil Ering) and a new addition to my collection, Wangari’s Trees of Peace:  A True Story from Africa (Jeanette Winter).

At one of our sites, I was pointing out to the children that the eggplants had not gone beyond flowering despite us being well into August.  I pondered aloud why this should be and heard one little girl responded that it was because of the BIG strike.  Well actually, Mother Nature definitely hasn’t been on strike while we left our gardens unattended.  It was rather humbling to return to our sites and find jungles.  The rain certainly helped keep many things alive, despite the lack of sun and heat for the eggplants and tomatoes alike.  There are certainly a lot of weeds but in some cases this has helped to safely hide our growing treasures.

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This past Sunday we went ahead and celebrated summer at the High Park Children’s Garden with the Tastes of the World Garden Fiesta.  Visitors to the garden had an opportunity to try flavorful vegetarian dishes, representing different parts of the globe, prepared by our Youth Cooking Program, using predominately local ingredients picked from the garden and purchased at the Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market.  My two favorites were the Ethiopian lentil salad with beautiful beets and sticky coconut rice served with peaches (a local twist to this recipe from Laos).

This special event included musical performers and garden activities, including  the chance for children to play with their food by creating edible snack sculptures.  It was delightful to watch their imaginations at work as they created exotic creatures from local produce, each one a work of art.

Reading recommendations for the Horticultural Therapy Community

*An on-line add on to a new section of the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association members’ newsletter.  You are invited to comment and share your favorite HT related books and research.

September/October 2009 Edition

Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness (2008)
Authors: Bunny Guinness & Jacqueline Knox
Is your garden work doing more harm to your body than good?  Are you modeling the safest techniques to your participants?
This unique book brings together the expert skills of a physiotherapist and garden designer to offer an approach to gardening that promotes good health.  Great ideas for using the garden as a site for regular exercise and how to look after yourself in the process of getting fit right in your backyard.

International Journal of Therapeutic Communities
Green Care Edition (2008)
Available free online.
Green Care uses a range of nature-based approaches to produce health, social or educational benefits.  These approaches included social and therapeutic horticulture, care farming, animal assisted interventions, green exercise, ecotherapy and wilderness/nature therapy.

This special edition of the journal provides a number of papers that draw parallels between green care and therapeutic communities.  Green care is a growing movement, especially in Europe, bringing a broad range of groups together to organize around research and practice.
How does this connect to what is happening in Canada?  What does it mean for the field of Horticultural Therapy?

I recently had the opportunity to visit the South Riverdale Community Health Centre rooftop garden which includes a number of raised beds and recycled containers growing a variety of vegetables and herbs.  There is even a view of the CN Tower!  The Garden Club was busy seed saving, harvesting and preparing a beautiful fresh salad for lunch.  This approach to health promotion would be a valuable addition to all of our community health centres in Toronto.

It was once discovered that two carrots had become so fond of each other that they grew together underground and formed a heart.

The Bosnian gardeners invite the community to Children’s Day at their New Horizons garden.

This Saturday July 25th from 4-6 p.m.

See flyer for full details.

Come see what happened to the Three Sisters Garden planted in the spring…

“If children were unionized they would surely organize walkout and strikes against such atrocious working conditions…The fact that they are still prevalent in the majority of schools, where supposedly children should learn understanding and respect for their surrounding, it a measure of adults’ disregard for children’s basic right to a safe environment, and one that is life-enhancing and developmentally supportive.”

Robin C. Moore

Before and After Asphalt:  Diversity as an Ecological Measure of Quality in Children’s Outdoor Environments.

Somehow this spring seemed to pass like a flash, perhaps due to the flurry of my activity, from moving to High Park to starting a brand new job with the City of Toronto, Parks Forestry & Recreation.  In the role of Expansion Assistant, with the Children’s Garden & Exploring Toronto Programs, I have the great fortune of being able to support City of Toronto sites integrating children’s gardening and environmental education into their programming.  The Program’s flagship location is the High Park Children’s Garden, a site I previously volunteered at in 2007.  The site is exemplary with wheel chair accessibility and raised beds.  In my role, I am seeking ways to include horticultural therapy practices into program delivery, in order to ensure that gardening can be fully enjoyed by all young people.

As part of this Program’s capacity building mandate, we offer City Staff Training and started the season with an interactive workshop, delivered by Jane Hayes, that provided many creative ideas for children’s garden programming.

A significant task, early on the job, was to pick the plant orders (vegetables and flowers) for a number of Expansion Sites across the City and to make deliveries.  I was thrilled to find myself once again in a greenhouse setting, especially considering the energy and activity of the large scale operation at the High Park Greenhouses.

Last spring/summer I spent considerable time working at the Providence Farm Greenhouse and was now pleasantly surprised to discover how transferable the skills I had gained were in my new place of employment.  My Horticultural Therapy Internship at Providence Farm was intended to develop my skills in working with people, yet it has become evident that I gained a considerable amount of horticulture knowledge simultaneously, including plant identification, watering, pest control, seeding, transplanting and picking.

Unfortunately, I am part of the on-going workers’ strike and haven’t been able to tend to the gardens and enthusiastic new gardeners.  I hope it will be resolved quickly…