Eco-Therapy Garden for Health & Wellbeing
BRIEF
Our clients were a couple who both worked from home and shared a strong belief in the benefits of spending time in nature.
They wanted a garden that could support health and wellbeing in two different but related ways.
The brief was to combine a beautiful private garden for their own everyday life with a landscape that could also be used for one-to-one eco-therapy — psychotherapy conducted outdoors.
The private garden needed to support relaxation, entertaining and their personal interests in horticulture, flower arranging and design.
The therapeutic landscape, however, required a more naturalistic character and spaces that could support movement, reflection and conversation.
DESIGN SOLUTION
The design is organised around two related landscapes;
The ‘Inner’ garden is the couple’s private space: more contemporary in character and designed for relaxing, entertaining and enjoying their interests in horticulture, flower arranging and design.
The ‘Outer’ garden has a more naturalistic quality. The couple can enjoy it privately, but it can also be used for one-to-one eco-therapy.
Within eco-therapy, contrasts, transitions, thresholds and the experience of journeying through a natural landscape can provide useful metaphors and different contexts for therapeutic conversation. Those ideas therefore helped inform the spatial character of the outer garden.
An important part of the design was the boundary between the two. It needed to be ‘semi-permeable’: providing sufficient privacy within the inner garden when therapy clients were present, without making the private and therapeutic landscapes feel completely separate from one another. The contemporary structure of the inner garden gradually gives way to the more naturalistic outer landscape, allowing the garden to shift in atmosphere while still reading as one coherent place.
The project illustrates how garden design can support wellbeing not simply through the presence of plants, but through spatial sequence, sensory experience, nature, privacy and the way a person moves through a landscape.
We have written a blog on why gardens and green space are good for you and if you are interested in therapy outdoors click here
We have built a reputation for designing gardens that are good for the soul – creating beautiful spaces that promote health and wellbeing, for example in this Mindfulness Garden
