What is Social and Therapeutic Horticulture ?

The definition below was agreed for use in the UK at a conference of practitioners in 1999. It aims to reflect the wide range of activities that are involved in the association between people and plants.

‘Social and therapeutic horticulture is the process by which individuals may develop well-being using plants and horticulture. This is achieved by active or passive involvement.’ (GrowthPoint issue 79, Autumn, 1999, p. 4)

Social and therapeutic horticulture also includes the more ‘formal’ horticultural therapy applications for both therapy and rehabilitation across all disability groups. In addition it includes the use of horticulture for embedded learning of basic skills (literacy, numeracy, etc.); addressing social or key skills (e.g. team working, patience) and the use of the outdoor environment to gain mental and physical health.

All these benefits can be expressed in the following model:

Aldridge & Sempik, 2003

This complexity of approach is reflected in the variety of garden projects using social and therapeutic horticulture. A survey by Thrive in 2003 gathered detailed information from 875 garden projects working with a wide range of disabled and disadvantaged people in the UK. It identified that over 21,000 clients take part in therapeutic horticulture activities each week. In other words, the projects provide one million client placements per year. Thrive’s survey also highlighted the following:

• the projects range from informal and casual to highly structured
• the first recorded project that still exists was started in 1913. From the mid 1980s there was a sharp rise in the number of projects being founded and this reached its peak in 2002 with 58 projects started in one year
• nearly half the projects (48.7%) provided services for people with learning difficulties, while 40.6% work with people with mental health problems
• the setting for the projects varies widely. Nearly 40% describe their project site as a ‘garden’. This includes walled gardens, vegetable plots, smallholdings, hospital and prison gardens and grounds, herb gardens and kitchen gardens
• twenty-two per cent operate on a nursery or garden centre and 32% on an allotment or community garden
• the survey of projects also showed that 3.7% of projects operate without any paid staff, whereas 52% have one or two paid staff and 71% use helpers or volunteers
• a large number of staff in social and therapeutic horticulture projects have qualifications thirty-nine point eight per cent are in horticulture, 27.6% in health and social care, 26.4% in teaching, 4.8% in occupational therapy and 2.6% in nursing. Ten point two per cent have a horticultural therapy qualification.

As well as the formal therapeutic horticulture projects, there are many services directed at those who are independent, i.e. older or disabled people living at home or in supported accommodation. In one survey of people living in supported accommodation, 70% of the residents said that the main reason that they moved to the accommodation was they could not look after their gardens at home.

Advice and information services are carried out to provide people with the information that they need to stay living where they want to – in their own homes. Around the UK there are several hundred organisations offering garden maintenance services to help in this process.

Most of the research has come from the United States but in the past few years an increasing amount is being carried out in the UK. This is mostly run by universities including a three-year UK-wide investigation run by Thrive and Loughborough University (see www.growingtogether.org.uk).