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How Plants Heal

Courtesy of Teresia Hazen, RHT, Coordinator of Therapeutic Gardens & Horticultural Therapy, Legacy Health System, Portland, Oregon

Physical Benefits:

• Motivate the client to walk, stoop, bend, reach, and maintain balance.

• Exercise the eyes through visual scanning, seeing near and far, and improving spatial relationships.

• Exercise hands, fingers, arms, and upper body.

• Gives mild to moderate exercise in coordination, strength, stamina, and physical activity when frequently nothing else will.

• Gives pleasure through the senses; seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting, and hearing.

• Motivates clients to use adaptive equipment as needed.

Cognitive Benefits:

• Helps to increase orientation.

• Exercises the attention span.

• Gives practice in following directions.

• Exercises the mind in terms of memory, logic, and safety judgment.

• Increases interest in gardening and the natural world.

• Stimulates understanding of such abstract concepts as time, growth, death, and change.

• Gives greater awareness of living things around us.

Social Benefits:

• Promotes interaction by providing a common interest to discuss.

• Improves social skills, self-esteem, and confidence.

• Gives practice in expressing opinions, formulating descriptions, asking questions, and exploring our sense of humor.

• Helps clients learn more effective work attitudes and behaviors.

• Motivates clients to work cooperatively with other people as a team.

• Promotes healthy interdependence.

Psychological Benefits:

• Helps rebuild self-esteem.

• Provides opportunities to relieve tension, frustration, and aggression.

• Promotes interest and enthusiasm for the future.

• Provides opportunity for creativity and self-expression.

• Lifts the spirits of those who have little sense of purpose or hope through isolation and loss due to illness, accident, disease process, retirement, or bereavement.