Garden Route Therapy

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?