An STH Practitioner will not ask the client to do a task that is required in the garden without first assessing that it will be of some benefit to them and their own goals. The maintenance of a garden should never be considered more important than the therapeutical value the programme is designed to offer.
There is a useful distinction to be made between activities which are largely experiential and activities which are largely interactive.
Healing and restorative gardens are gardens that tend to promote experiential contact with nature. This is so because the focus of each of these spaces tends to be on peace, tranquillity, stress recovery, attention restoration and so on. Whereas therapeutic and horticultural therapy gardens tend to promote interactive contact with nature - the maintenance of the garden, by people who are receiving a physical, cognitive, psychological and, or social benefit from gardening, is most often a component of the design process.
However, all gardens should provide opportunities for both the experiential and the interactive, to a greater or lesser degree. In fact, all interactive connections with a garden have an experiential component.
To understand more about wellbeing benefits of activity and occupation, we look to the Model of Human Occupation (Kielhofner, 1980), a clientâcentred conceptual model used for occupational therapy. It addresses why we engage in meaningful activities (occupations) and considers Volition (how people are motivated), Habituation (patterns and routines) and Performance Capacity (our ability to perform a behaviour).