Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes

Cultivated Therapeutic Landscapes provides an in-depth and critical exploration of the impact of gardens and gardening on health and wellbeing. It explores the gardens and gardening provide prevention and restoration mechanisms, while also improving social and health equity via a range of traditional and innovative green space sites and actions.

Therapeutic landscapes are relational, reciprocal, and evolving. In this book, leading scholars from across the globe demonstrate how therapeutic landscapes research and practice is expanded through and around the processes of cultivation. Deliberately interdisciplinary, the book explores how tending and caring for green spaces, collectively and individually, works to prevent and restore health and wellbeing, as well as impact upstream factors determining social justice and equity. A unique combination of academics, clinicians and practitioners deliver theoretical and practical insights into wide-ranging health-enabling factors, based on new evidence and autoethnographic experiences in home gardens, school, and community gardens, clinical settings, public green spaces and sites of conservation and wildness. This book pushes concepts of cultivation and horticulture into underexplored spatial, ontological, and wellbeing territories. Despite long-term practical interest, therapeutic horticulture is only now establishing a strong theoretical and research foundation.

This book provides much needed critical insights into impact on the key drivers of health, wellbeing and social equity, with a focus on practical skills for utilizing horticulture or designing for particular health needs. It will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of health geography; cultural geography; cultural studies; therapeutic horticulture; environmental studies; community development and planning; landscape architecture; social work; health studies and health policy.