Garden therapy combines the science of therapy with the art of gardening to externalise and stimulate the healing process.

Just as plants need many different elements to flourish such as sunlight, lots of water, and air, others may need dappled light, dry soil and support to climb on. So it is with us humans; we need a wide-ranging set of variables for our healing along the way. 

Gardening can help us to understand things about ourselves such as how diverse and unique each of us are; just like the plant family, we are sturdy, delicate, strong, bright, muted, and many other things.

How It Works

The garden therapy programme works best in tandem with your therapy. Having a visual and touchable example of the growth cycle helps enormously in shedding light on the process of healing. The following activities are available to you as an individual or as part of a group at the Healing Haven in Jamaica:

 Nature Walks
 Plant Propagation
 Pot Planting
 Ground Planting
 Feet Planting
 Creating Sacred Spaces
 Creating Miniature Gardens
 Garden Art
 Fire Pit Watching
 Fruit Picking
 Sunbathing

The Process of Garden Therapy

We believe that it is crucial to understand our own processes in order to heal. To achieve this it is tremendously valuable to understand:

• What healthy, vibrant and harmonious actually looks like within the environment.

• What deterioration looks like and the interruption of that process for healthy outcomes.

• What we actively do that is detrimental to healthy outcomes.

A working garden offers this imagery and state of being in abundance!

Garden therapy has been found to: 

• Reduce anxiety

• Reduce the impact of depression

• Release anger and tension

• Assist in developing a sense of self worth

• Release hostility and aggression

• Generate greater control of self

• Generate awareness of the environment

• Provide opportunities for treatment

• Strengthen interpersonal relations through mutual communication

How can the Garden Programme Assist Your Healing Journey?

• In a number of ways simple plant propagation - that is, taking parts of an original plant including roots, stems, seeds or leaves, placing them in optimal conditions, and making a new, fresh and vibrant offspring - helps us make connections when our life’s trauma or illness has shattered or sullied our lives. It also helps us meet the therapeutic goal of taking what we have left (i.e. the parts of ourselves) and re-configuring a new whole - a renewed person.

• A professor at the Center for Health Systems and Design at Texas A & M University found that viewing natural scenes or elements fosters stress recovery by evoking positive feelings, reducing negative emotions, effectively holding attention/ interest, and blocking or reducing stressful thoughts.

• For turbo-speed healing you need to engage a mentor or two (professional ones are best) and connect to a healing community. This community exists at the Healing Haven. Many of the people here are also practitioners of healing who you can experiment with and share new ways of being and doing. These persons are not invested in the old you - they don’t even know or need to know the old you. Furthermore, they are already committed to their own journey and they know that it is possible. When you join that journey they will be rooting for you too! The place we choose to do all of this mentoring and coaching is in the garden.