Planting Hope
Therapeutic Gardening and Emotional Health
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Saturday 6 November 2021
With Ozichi Brewster, Mike Morgan, Sue Stuart-Smith, and Dr Maggie Turp
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Wednesday 3 November
Saturday 6 November 2021 has been declared a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice in which communities all around the world will come together to build power for systems change; at COP26 the theme for this date is ‘Nature: Ensuring the importance of nature and sustainable land use are part of global action on climate change and a clean, green recovery.’ Planting Hope is Confer’s contribution to this day of action, and we are inviting psychotherapists and others to join us in thinking about food, soil, land equity, and the balance of our relationship with the earth in the wider context of the environmental crisis.
READ MORE...The concept of horticulture as therapy has a long history, rooted in the belief that connection with the plant world restores equilibrium and re-engagement with life. It does so through the generative and creative acts of growing from seed, nurturing and bringing to harvest; by reconnecting us with our natural contexts of earth, weather and seasons. In this time of need for urgent climate and environmental action, connection to the needs of our planetary home, our relationship with the soil, plants and land, could never be more relevant. Furthermore, the mental health that such engagement evokes places it at the heart of psychotherapy.
Gardening develops both a sense of agency and transformation and can develop community and mutuality. It reconnects us with life beyond human technology and reminds us of our interdependence with other life forms on the earth.
FULL PROGRAMME
10.00 GMT (06.00 EDT)
Introductions
10.05
Mike Morgan
Solid Ground: Principles, Rationale and Evidence Underpinning the Use of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture for Mental Wellbeing
This introduction to the use of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture (STH) will outline the history and theoretical foundations of using gardens and gardening for the promotion and remediation of mental wellbeing. Mike will explain the key principles of contemporary STH and how these develop a rationale for practice. He will critique current research and the policy context, and finally suggest strategies for optimising STH service development.
10.45
Q&A
11.00
Break
11.15
Dr Maggie Turp
Therapeutic Perspectives on a Community Horticulture Initiative
In this presentation, Maggie will tell the story of a community-based gardening project in London. From small beginnings, the project has grown to become a community of 25 adults and their children, including asylum seekers alongside established local residents. Although not explicitly therapeutic in intent, the project provides a vector for examining the mental health benefits of growing food, herbs and flowers, and in particular of growing plants with others. The project has evoked for Maggie such ideas as ‘continuity of being’, ‘vitality contours’, ‘mutuality’, ‘land, food and home’, ‘biophilia’, ‘agency’ and ‘transformation’.
12.00
Q&A
12.15
Break
13.15
Ozichi Brewster
The Magic of Growing Plants: Social Prescribing at RHS Garden Bridgewater
RHS Garden Bridgewater is pioneering a social prescribing project to support the local community’s wellbeing. People have been referred to the garden through ‘social prescribing’ by their doctors and our wellbeing programme is looking at ways therapeutic gardening, gardens and green spaces can transform people’s lives. Plants need care and by tending to them in a community we see life develop on many levels. That’s usually quite magical for people.
14.00
Q&A
14.15
Break
14.30
Sue Stuart-Smith
The Well-Gardened Mind
The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nature and reward. From the science of the brain’s own ‘gardener cells’, to the beauty of flowers and the grounding effects of working with nature’s rhythms of growth, decay and regeneration, Stuart-Smith provides a new perspective on the power of gardening. Using case studies of people struggling with stress, depression, trauma and addiction, as well as her own grandfather’s return from World War I, she explores the many ways in which gardening can help transform people’s lives.
15.15
Q&A
15.30
Q&A with all speakers
16.00
End