Restorative Gardens ─ The Healing Landscape

Restorative gardens for the sick, which were a vital part of the healing process from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, provided ordered and beautiful settings in which patients could begin to heal, both physically and mentally. In this engaging book, a landscape architect, a physician, and a historian examine the history and role of restorative gardens to show why it is important to again integrate nature into the institutional?and largely factorylike?settings of modern health care facilities.

In this unique book, Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs, Dr. Richard Enoch Kaufman, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., unfold their argument by presenting the history of restorative gardens and studies of six American health care centers that cherish the role of their gardens in the therapeutic process. These institutions are examined in detail: community hospitals in Wausau, Wisconsin, and Monterey, California; a full-care mental institution in Philadelphia; a nursing home in Queens; a facility for rehabilitative medicine in New York City; and a hospice in Houston. In their comprehensive review the authors suggest that contemporary scientific understanding clearly recognizes the beneficial physiological effects of garden environments on patients’ well-being. The book ends with a plea to make gardens?rather than the shopping mall atria so often seen in newly renovated hospitals?a vital part of the medical milieu.

Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs is a landscape designer and a director of the Meristem Foundation, which promotes the role of gardens in health care. Richard Enoch Kaufman is assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine and a practicing physician. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., is visiting professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and author of two classics in the field of urban studies: Streetcar Suburbs and To Dwell Is to Garden.