Well Being and Gardens
“Gardening teaches us that we cannot always have our own way and yet allows us to feel good about that reality.” (Lewis, Charles. A. Green Nature/Human Nature)
Kirsten Reberg-Horton
When we pick up a quart of strawberries at the store or the farmer’s market, we go home and wash them and feel frustrated or thwarted if some of the berries aren’t edible. We expect that we will get what we want - which is a quart of delicious, perfect strawberries, exactly like when we buy a pack of Bic pens, we expect them all to work the same way that our last pack of Bic pens worked.
When my children and I pick a quart of strawberries out of our garden, we are delighted and amazed by the perfect ones that we find. We’re astonished by the sweetness. We set the rotten or bitten ones aside for compost or the chickens. We accept that we can’t have our own way - every single strawberry will not be edible - and yet we still feel really good about our reality.
Having learned this through gardening, we have tolerated disappointment that isn’t crushing. We’re rewarded for learning this lesson with the sweet taste of strawberries, the looseness of our muscles, the warmth of the sun on our bodies, the sounds of the outside and a feeling of reward and relaxation.
Another “not having our own way” lesson that the garden teaches us is that of loss. Inevitably, plants die. Bees die. Butterflies die. If we spend time in the garden, we experience life, growth and death. Our wish would be to have the beautiful butterfly forever, just as she is now, but she dies. The gentle way that this lesson is learned - surrounded by the comforting growth of the garden, reassured by the ongoing life around us - helps us to feel joy in our reality in spite of the sadness of loss. One prized plant is chewed by voles while another unexpected plant grows and delights us.
We may expect ourselves to be perfect. We feel that everything we do must succeed. The process of being with plants in the role of caretaker helps us to practice letting go of perfectionism. We may water and weed and a plant still dies. We come to understand that even doing things perfectly may not prevent failure. We learn that we are not in complete control. Because the garden holds so many other rewards, we are able to accept the reality of imperfection. Instead, the plant takes what we offer without judgment and thrives or fails in part due to us and in part due to other factors. We become one element in a complex system.
All of those experiences we share in the garden bolsters our self esteem and soothes our nervous systems. We become more optimistic and resilient. We learn to value our strong bodies and the health of the environment. By nurturing our garden, we nurture ourselves.
Kirsten Reberg-Horton
When we pick up a quart of strawberries at the store or the farmer’s market, we go home and wash them and feel frustrated or thwarted if some of the berries aren’t edible. We expect that we will get what we want - which is a quart of delicious, perfect strawberries, exactly like when we buy a pack of Bic pens, we expect them all to work the same way that our last pack of Bic pens worked.
When my children and I pick a quart of strawberries out of our garden, we are delighted and amazed by the perfect ones that we find. We’re astonished by the sweetness. We set the rotten or bitten ones aside for compost or the chickens. We accept that we can’t have our own way - every single strawberry will not be edible - and yet we still feel really good about our reality.
Having learned this through gardening, we have tolerated disappointment that isn’t crushing. We’re rewarded for learning this lesson with the sweet taste of strawberries, the looseness of our muscles, the warmth of the sun on our bodies, the sounds of the outside and a feeling of reward and relaxation.
Another “not having our own way” lesson that the garden teaches us is that of loss. Inevitably, plants die. Bees die. Butterflies die. If we spend time in the garden, we experience life, growth and death. Our wish would be to have the beautiful butterfly forever, just as she is now, but she dies. The gentle way that this lesson is learned - surrounded by the comforting growth of the garden, reassured by the ongoing life around us - helps us to feel joy in our reality in spite of the sadness of loss. One prized plant is chewed by voles while another unexpected plant grows and delights us.
We may expect ourselves to be perfect. We feel that everything we do must succeed. The process of being with plants in the role of caretaker helps us to practice letting go of perfectionism. We may water and weed and a plant still dies. We come to understand that even doing things perfectly may not prevent failure. We learn that we are not in complete control. Because the garden holds so many other rewards, we are able to accept the reality of imperfection. Instead, the plant takes what we offer without judgment and thrives or fails in part due to us and in part due to other factors. We become one element in a complex system.
All of those experiences we share in the garden bolsters our self esteem and soothes our nervous systems. We become more optimistic and resilient. We learn to value our strong bodies and the health of the environment. By nurturing our garden, we nurture ourselves.
University of Maine Extension Bulletin #2701, Designing Your Landscape for Maine, Developed by Kirsten Reberg-Horton, landscape designer, in collaboration with Lois Berg Stack, Extension ornamental horticulture specialist and Laura Wilson, Extension assistant scientist.
University of Maine Extension Bulletin #2702: Adding a Rain Garden to Your Landscape, landscape diagrams and plant lists by Kirsten Reberg-Horton
Kirsten also was the author of the landscape design portion of the Maine Master Gardeners’ Handbook, 2004
Letting Go and Holding Close: Locating Love in a Container Garden
An Expressive Therapy for Grief Counseling Utilizing a Therapeutic Horticulture Modality
Kirsten Reberg-Horton
February 2, 2022
Abstract: This article connects mental health grief work with the benefits of therapeutic horticulture. Diving into mental health sources, therapeutic horticultural research and art, the powerful healing qualities of nature are shown to be beneficial to the wellbeing of patients and clients. A specific activity, creating a container garden that symbolizes a loss, is described. The many ways that this garden can assist in healing are suggested and connected to the goals of a therapist working with a grieving client.
Grief in Tradition
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis describes mourning as the process of removing active affection from the absent so that the ego can be “free and uninhibited again” (Freud, 1963). Western mental health has continued as well as modified that tradition in many ways, up to the diagnosis included in the DSM V’s Conditions for Further Study: Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (Association et al., 2013). The differential diagnosis instructs practitioners to rule out the following before diagnosis: normal grief, depressive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and separation anxiety disorder. By looking carefully at those and the disorders listed as frequently comorbid with Complex Bereavement, there are numerous opportunities for mental health and therapeutic horticultural interventions with the bereaved.
In this paper, I will be focusing on the use of Therapeutic Horticulture in working with grief and loss. Most of the literature around this topic centers around the loss of death, but I will argue that these interventions can also benefit individuals suffering from ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, intergenerational loss and other loss experiences. The pain of loss is the central source of human suffering. Little losses trigger physical and mental memories of larger losses and can take us unaware, flooding us with unexpected emotion. There is a need for modern people to find helpful and meaningful ways to grieve and to connect with one another in our grief.
Looking at grief and mourning in nonwestern cultures, one finds a wide variety of traditions, customs, coping skills and norms. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are several ways that the mourner serves the deceased in the first 49 days: 1. Recitation of a series of prayers and meditations that instruct the dead in how to move through the death process. 2. Food offerings 3. Compassionate acts that can transfer merit to the deceased and help them when they come before the Lord of Death, and 4. Proper disposal of the body. Later, they celebrate the deceased on the anniversary of their death and in that way continue to remember them (Klass & Goss Dennis, 1997). By participating in the death process for a loved one, the mourner also gains skills and competence in death for themselves. Because Buddhism’s central teaching revolves around the acceptance of impermanence and the inevitability of suffering, training oneself to accept mortality is a central spiritual task. Buddhists do not expect mourners to be finished with the process after the 49 days. Continued markers of grief are wearing dark clothes, not putting up your hair and not wearing jewelry.
In the Jewish tradition, the community honors the dead four times a year at special Yizkor services. The family will honor their dead on the anniversary of their death by lighting a candle, creating a shrine and recalling memories. As in the Buddhist tradition, there are clear responsibilities for mourners and outward ways to mark grieving. This tradition emphasizes the role of the community in several different ways: 1. They offer members to provide Shmirah (the ritual guarding of the person’s body.) 2. They offer a select group to perform Taharah (the washing of the body). 3. They support the chief mourners during the period of aninut and shiva by providing meals, helping with child-care, and doing other necessary activities. 4. They also provide additional members so that there is a Minyan to recite Kaddish. These important functions of the community surround the mourners with love and practical care and acknowledge the special nature of the period of grief (Jewish End-of-Life Practices, n.d.).
Western guides for the bereaved can learn from other cultures how to reintegrate respect for the life cycle, connection to ancestors, the importance of community and the comfort of ritual. By drawing on rich traditions around the world, we can be reminded of the way death is woven into life and the acknowledgement of death and its impact on the living serves to comfort the bereaved. By broadening these traditions to include other kinds of grief and loss, therapists can facilitate healing and teach coping skills, strategies and new rituals that can serve people at other crisis points in their lives.
Therapeutic Horticulture and Mental Health
By way of introducing how Therapeutic Horticulture can serve in this work, I would like to defer to Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In her well researched book, The Well Gardened Mind, Smith beautifully weaves together Western Psychology’s traditions around bereavement with the benefits of Therapeutic Horticulture. She writes,
We encounter losses in so many different ways throughout our lives, that is, Freud writes, as if we are always mourning for something. The cycle of life can help us because in the depths of winter, a belief in the return of spring gives us something to hold on to. “As regards the beauty of Nature,” Freud observes, “each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal” (Stuart-Smith, 2021).
The cycle of nature and the beauty of rebirth are important metaphors for us as we cope with grief and loss. Studies of people around the world support evolutionary psychologists’ assertion that human’s receptiveness to the natural world is because of the way that we evolved in relationship to it. In Green Nature / Human Nature,
Charles A, Lewis writes:
That green environments satisfy intuitively can be verified… When people of diverse backgrounds are given a choice of scenes of nature and scenes of buildings, nature wins out. If asked to choose between urban scenes with or without vegetation, settings that include plants are selected. This is our genetic heritage at work, preferring landscapes that are evolutionarily most familiar (Lewis, n.d.).
Along with researchers and mental health experts, poets and artists support our intuitive understanding that our link with nature is one of the most powerful metaphors we have as human beings. In his book, The Wild Braid, poet Stanley Kunitz writes insightfully about his relationship with his garden. As a poet, he beautifully describes the intimate connection and resonance that he feels with nature as well as its ability to transform him.
I think of the garden as an extension of one’s own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. The difference is that the garden is alive, and it is created to endure just the way a human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys and is mortal. The lifespan of a flowering plant can be so short, so abbreviated by the changing of the seasons, it seems to be a compressed parable of the human experience (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007).
By offering people in grief opportunities to connect with the seemingly eternal, alive, resonant power of nature, we are able to tap into our specie’s birthright as co-evolvers on this earth. It is right outside. This powerful medicine that can soothe our spirits, heal our souls and provide balm for our sadness is the very alive and growing natural world around us.
In her poetry, Pattiann Rogers conveys the cellular connection she feels with nature. The first two stanzas of her poem, Second Witness go as follows:
The only function of the red-cupped fruit / Hanging from the red stem of the sassafras / Is to reveal the same shiny blue orb of berry / Existing in me. /
The only purpose of the row of hemlocks blowing / On the rocky ridge is to give form to the crossed lines / And clicking twigs, the needle-leaf matrix / Of evergreen motion I have always possessed (Rogers, 1994). She identifies with the nature around her, blurring the boundaries of self and other. Sue Stuart-Smith brings us to gardening as a distinctly human way of interacting with nature in her discussion of the joy of “being a cause.” She says, “Making things grow has a kind of mystery to it, and we can claim some of that mystery for ourselves… central to the vital connection between people and plants {is} the enormous satisfaction we derive from making things happen and the joy we can feel in being a cause. (Stuart-Smith, 2021). That joy of being a cause is creativity - the joy of creation. It is the way that every human being, old, young, male or female or nonbinary can participate in giving birth. Kunitz celebrates the world as being the source of creativity. He says, “We have no other world we can actually invade with all our being and at the same time be invaded by, so whatever we create is made of the materials of this life” (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007). For Kunitz the poet and the gardener must be receptive to the experience of being alive, and by being so, gives voice to its essence.
Connecting to nature connects us to something larger than ourselves. For the religious, it is often through the beauty of nature that the presence of God is revealed. However one constructs meaning, nature has a power to bring us in, to capture our attention. Lewis writes, “Nature itself can entrap us involuntarily, occupy our minds, shut out daily cares, and allow us to become refreshed” (Lewis, n.d.). Mindfulness, a component of many mental health modalities like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, asks the individual to be in the present moment (Hayes et al., 2006). Nature helps us to do that.
Therapy and Grief
In the textbook on Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, the Fifth Edition by J. William Worden, Chapter Six looks at Resolving Complicated Mourning. In that chapter, Worden outlines four tasks for the therapist: 1. Help the Patient Acknowledge the Finality of the Loss 2. Help the Patient Design a New Life Without the Deceased 3. Assess and Help the Patient Improve Social Relationships 4. Help the Patient deal with the Fantasy of Ending Grieving (William Worden & ABPP, 2018). By harnessing the rich metaphors, captivating qualities and creative opportunities Therapeutic Horticultural interventions can do all of those things.
There are so many ways that practitioners can use Horticulture in therapy. In this piece, I will describe one activity that addresses all the above four goals for working with the bereaved. Preferably, this activity would be done with a small group of clients who share a similar type of loss. It can be adapted for use with many age groups and abilities. Therapists should have an understanding of the cultures, worldviews and norms of clients participating so that the materials and language used is relevant to their particular needs.
Introducing an Activity: Letting Go and Holding Close: Locating Love in a Container Garden
In this activity, clients create a container garden that symbolizes the loss that they want to focus on. Through the choice of container, plant material, special objects and enrichment activities, the client builds a place for grief. The process of creating the garden is an opportunity for social connection, creative expression, connecting to nature and its metaphors, talking about the loss and learning new things. After completion, the garden can function as a therapeutic tool in the client’s daily life. As outlined by Worden, this activity can address the needs of the client.
The garden also provides rich opportunities for valuable metaphor and should be an ongoing topic of reflection with the therapist. If a plant dies, for example, it’s useful to reflect on the fact that sometimes, even if we do everything right, the object of our love does not always respond in the way that we intended. Being perfect sometimes doesn’t change the outcome. The new growth after cutting back a plant can be a way to talk about the new opportunities that can come when we set appropriate boundaries. The seasonal changes can be away to broach topics of aging, seasonal affective disorder and others. A plan should also be in place in the unlikely event that everything in the garden dies. The client should be prepared that this may happen and have a plan in place for how they will handle it. Will they replant the garden with something new? Will they choose a new location and replant? Will they create a “garden” that doesn’t require so much care? How will they plan to cope with this possible loss?
Once the powerful day of garden creation is past, the garden itself becomes part of the ongoing therapeutic process. It can be used in any number of therapeutic interventions. The client can write a letter to the loved one and read it to the plants. The client may play music to the plants and thereby enjoy happy memories of times with the beloved, The client may have chosen plants with a resonant fragrance. The scent may bring back fond memories and sachets of dried leaves or flowers may be made from the garden. If an edible is included in the garden, the harvesting and enjoying of that food can be a powerful ritual of memory and celebration. As each client incorporates the garden into their lives, their own cultures and traditions will be interwoven with it, building in relevant meanings and assisting in their healing.
Supporting self-esteem, physical health, meaning making, social goals, creativity, and connections to the natural world, therapeutic horticulture is a potent tool that therapists can enlist in serving their clients. As we work to slow people down and integrate mindfulness into their daily lives, reconnecting to natural time, the pace of plant growth and change can be transformative.
Finally, Kunitz writes about the ways that engaging with nature, with gardens can dispel loneliness and make us appreciate a life of meaning and connection.
I strongly identify with Henry James when he wrote, in answer to a letter asking him what compelled him to write, “The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life…” One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one’s family extends across the borders of the species and belongs to everything that lives. I feel I’m not only sharing the planet, but also sharing my life… Certainly this is one of the great joys of living in this garden (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007).
Bibliography
Association, A. P., Association, A. P., & Others. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5. Arlington, VA. https://www.amberton.edu/media/Syllabi/Spring%202022/Graduate/CSL6798_E1.pdf
Freud, S. (1963). Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Eds. Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, 24, 244.
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and commitment therapy: model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25.
Jewish End-of-Life Practices. (n.d.). Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://www.jewish-funerals.org/understanding-jewish-practices/jewish-end-of-life-practices/
Klass, R. E. G. D., & Goss Dennis, R. (1997). TIBETAN BUDDHISM AND THE RESOLUTION OF GRIEF: THE BARDO-THODOL FOR THE DYING AND THE GRIEVING. In Death Studies (Vol. 21, Issue 4, pp. 377–395). https://doi.org/10.1080/074811897201895
Kunitz, S., & Lentine, G. (2007). The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. W. W. Norton, Incorporated.
Lewis, C. A. (n.d.). Green Nature. Human Nature: The Meaning of Plants in Our Lives. https://philpapers.org/rec/LEWGN
Rogers, P. (1994). Firekeeper: New & selected poems. Milkweed Editions.
Stuart-Smith, S. (2021). The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature. Simon and Schuster.
William Worden, J., & ABPP. (2018). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. Springer Publishing Company.
An Expressive Therapy for Grief Counseling Utilizing a Therapeutic Horticulture Modality
Kirsten Reberg-Horton
February 2, 2022
Abstract: This article connects mental health grief work with the benefits of therapeutic horticulture. Diving into mental health sources, therapeutic horticultural research and art, the powerful healing qualities of nature are shown to be beneficial to the wellbeing of patients and clients. A specific activity, creating a container garden that symbolizes a loss, is described. The many ways that this garden can assist in healing are suggested and connected to the goals of a therapist working with a grieving client.
Grief in Tradition
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis describes mourning as the process of removing active affection from the absent so that the ego can be “free and uninhibited again” (Freud, 1963). Western mental health has continued as well as modified that tradition in many ways, up to the diagnosis included in the DSM V’s Conditions for Further Study: Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (Association et al., 2013). The differential diagnosis instructs practitioners to rule out the following before diagnosis: normal grief, depressive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and separation anxiety disorder. By looking carefully at those and the disorders listed as frequently comorbid with Complex Bereavement, there are numerous opportunities for mental health and therapeutic horticultural interventions with the bereaved.
In this paper, I will be focusing on the use of Therapeutic Horticulture in working with grief and loss. Most of the literature around this topic centers around the loss of death, but I will argue that these interventions can also benefit individuals suffering from ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, intergenerational loss and other loss experiences. The pain of loss is the central source of human suffering. Little losses trigger physical and mental memories of larger losses and can take us unaware, flooding us with unexpected emotion. There is a need for modern people to find helpful and meaningful ways to grieve and to connect with one another in our grief.
Looking at grief and mourning in nonwestern cultures, one finds a wide variety of traditions, customs, coping skills and norms. In Tibetan Buddhism, there are several ways that the mourner serves the deceased in the first 49 days: 1. Recitation of a series of prayers and meditations that instruct the dead in how to move through the death process. 2. Food offerings 3. Compassionate acts that can transfer merit to the deceased and help them when they come before the Lord of Death, and 4. Proper disposal of the body. Later, they celebrate the deceased on the anniversary of their death and in that way continue to remember them (Klass & Goss Dennis, 1997). By participating in the death process for a loved one, the mourner also gains skills and competence in death for themselves. Because Buddhism’s central teaching revolves around the acceptance of impermanence and the inevitability of suffering, training oneself to accept mortality is a central spiritual task. Buddhists do not expect mourners to be finished with the process after the 49 days. Continued markers of grief are wearing dark clothes, not putting up your hair and not wearing jewelry.
In the Jewish tradition, the community honors the dead four times a year at special Yizkor services. The family will honor their dead on the anniversary of their death by lighting a candle, creating a shrine and recalling memories. As in the Buddhist tradition, there are clear responsibilities for mourners and outward ways to mark grieving. This tradition emphasizes the role of the community in several different ways: 1. They offer members to provide Shmirah (the ritual guarding of the person’s body.) 2. They offer a select group to perform Taharah (the washing of the body). 3. They support the chief mourners during the period of aninut and shiva by providing meals, helping with child-care, and doing other necessary activities. 4. They also provide additional members so that there is a Minyan to recite Kaddish. These important functions of the community surround the mourners with love and practical care and acknowledge the special nature of the period of grief (Jewish End-of-Life Practices, n.d.).
Western guides for the bereaved can learn from other cultures how to reintegrate respect for the life cycle, connection to ancestors, the importance of community and the comfort of ritual. By drawing on rich traditions around the world, we can be reminded of the way death is woven into life and the acknowledgement of death and its impact on the living serves to comfort the bereaved. By broadening these traditions to include other kinds of grief and loss, therapists can facilitate healing and teach coping skills, strategies and new rituals that can serve people at other crisis points in their lives.
Therapeutic Horticulture and Mental Health
By way of introducing how Therapeutic Horticulture can serve in this work, I would like to defer to Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. In her well researched book, The Well Gardened Mind, Smith beautifully weaves together Western Psychology’s traditions around bereavement with the benefits of Therapeutic Horticulture. She writes,
We encounter losses in so many different ways throughout our lives, that is, Freud writes, as if we are always mourning for something. The cycle of life can help us because in the depths of winter, a belief in the return of spring gives us something to hold on to. “As regards the beauty of Nature,” Freud observes, “each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal” (Stuart-Smith, 2021).
The cycle of nature and the beauty of rebirth are important metaphors for us as we cope with grief and loss. Studies of people around the world support evolutionary psychologists’ assertion that human’s receptiveness to the natural world is because of the way that we evolved in relationship to it. In Green Nature / Human Nature,
Charles A, Lewis writes:
That green environments satisfy intuitively can be verified… When people of diverse backgrounds are given a choice of scenes of nature and scenes of buildings, nature wins out. If asked to choose between urban scenes with or without vegetation, settings that include plants are selected. This is our genetic heritage at work, preferring landscapes that are evolutionarily most familiar (Lewis, n.d.).
Along with researchers and mental health experts, poets and artists support our intuitive understanding that our link with nature is one of the most powerful metaphors we have as human beings. In his book, The Wild Braid, poet Stanley Kunitz writes insightfully about his relationship with his garden. As a poet, he beautifully describes the intimate connection and resonance that he feels with nature as well as its ability to transform him.
I think of the garden as an extension of one’s own being, something as deeply personal and intimate as writing a poem. The difference is that the garden is alive, and it is created to endure just the way a human being comes into the world and lives, suffers, enjoys and is mortal. The lifespan of a flowering plant can be so short, so abbreviated by the changing of the seasons, it seems to be a compressed parable of the human experience (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007).
By offering people in grief opportunities to connect with the seemingly eternal, alive, resonant power of nature, we are able to tap into our specie’s birthright as co-evolvers on this earth. It is right outside. This powerful medicine that can soothe our spirits, heal our souls and provide balm for our sadness is the very alive and growing natural world around us.
In her poetry, Pattiann Rogers conveys the cellular connection she feels with nature. The first two stanzas of her poem, Second Witness go as follows:
The only function of the red-cupped fruit / Hanging from the red stem of the sassafras / Is to reveal the same shiny blue orb of berry / Existing in me. /
The only purpose of the row of hemlocks blowing / On the rocky ridge is to give form to the crossed lines / And clicking twigs, the needle-leaf matrix / Of evergreen motion I have always possessed (Rogers, 1994). She identifies with the nature around her, blurring the boundaries of self and other. Sue Stuart-Smith brings us to gardening as a distinctly human way of interacting with nature in her discussion of the joy of “being a cause.” She says, “Making things grow has a kind of mystery to it, and we can claim some of that mystery for ourselves… central to the vital connection between people and plants {is} the enormous satisfaction we derive from making things happen and the joy we can feel in being a cause. (Stuart-Smith, 2021). That joy of being a cause is creativity - the joy of creation. It is the way that every human being, old, young, male or female or nonbinary can participate in giving birth. Kunitz celebrates the world as being the source of creativity. He says, “We have no other world we can actually invade with all our being and at the same time be invaded by, so whatever we create is made of the materials of this life” (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007). For Kunitz the poet and the gardener must be receptive to the experience of being alive, and by being so, gives voice to its essence.
Connecting to nature connects us to something larger than ourselves. For the religious, it is often through the beauty of nature that the presence of God is revealed. However one constructs meaning, nature has a power to bring us in, to capture our attention. Lewis writes, “Nature itself can entrap us involuntarily, occupy our minds, shut out daily cares, and allow us to become refreshed” (Lewis, n.d.). Mindfulness, a component of many mental health modalities like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, asks the individual to be in the present moment (Hayes et al., 2006). Nature helps us to do that.
Therapy and Grief
In the textbook on Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, the Fifth Edition by J. William Worden, Chapter Six looks at Resolving Complicated Mourning. In that chapter, Worden outlines four tasks for the therapist: 1. Help the Patient Acknowledge the Finality of the Loss 2. Help the Patient Design a New Life Without the Deceased 3. Assess and Help the Patient Improve Social Relationships 4. Help the Patient deal with the Fantasy of Ending Grieving (William Worden & ABPP, 2018). By harnessing the rich metaphors, captivating qualities and creative opportunities Therapeutic Horticultural interventions can do all of those things.
There are so many ways that practitioners can use Horticulture in therapy. In this piece, I will describe one activity that addresses all the above four goals for working with the bereaved. Preferably, this activity would be done with a small group of clients who share a similar type of loss. It can be adapted for use with many age groups and abilities. Therapists should have an understanding of the cultures, worldviews and norms of clients participating so that the materials and language used is relevant to their particular needs.
Introducing an Activity: Letting Go and Holding Close: Locating Love in a Container Garden
In this activity, clients create a container garden that symbolizes the loss that they want to focus on. Through the choice of container, plant material, special objects and enrichment activities, the client builds a place for grief. The process of creating the garden is an opportunity for social connection, creative expression, connecting to nature and its metaphors, talking about the loss and learning new things. After completion, the garden can function as a therapeutic tool in the client’s daily life. As outlined by Worden, this activity can address the needs of the client.
- Help the Patient Acknowledge the Finality of the Loss. The wording around this goal is very specific to someone grieving a death but acknowledging and identifying the qualities of any loss is central to healing. Acknowledgement is accomplished in this activity in a number of ways. First, by planning to come and then showing up, the client indicates that there is a loss with which they are struggling. As they go through the process of selecting materials for their garden, the client can reflect on the qualities of the loss. This reflection requires honesty and vulnerability. Being in community with others who are going through the same process gives support and reinforcement that the activity is worthwhile. As the therapist introduces relevant gardening-based metaphors, the client is able to connect their loss to the cycles of nature.
- Help the Patient Design a New Life Without the Deceased. Another way to word this, would be, “help the client imagine life while accepting the change of this loss”. When clients take their gardens home, they are instructed to place them in a location at home that has meaning for them and is comfortable to them in terms of the amount of visibility they want their loss to have. If they are comfortable sharing about their loss with most people and feel that they can handle the reminder of it on a regular basis, they might want to place their garden near their front door. If their grief is more private, or needs to be doled out in manageable moments, they may choose to put their garden in a secluded place. The location of the loss garden has a symbolic meaning to the client. It respects their location on their personal grief path and literally places that loss in physical space. By choosing how often they want to interact with the loss, they in some ways choose how to integrate it into their daily life. In mindfulness, we approach life with the opportunity of each new day. By choosing how we are able to interact with our grief, we make choices for how to design our days.
- Assess and Help the Patient Improve Social Relationships. The process of building the container garden is a unique opportunity for connection and forming community. Being together with others who share a similar kind of loss helps one to feel less alone. This activity might be a part of an ongoing grief support group, or it might be a standalone activity, but it provides multiple opportunities for connecting with others. First, vulnerability and communication is modeled by the therapist who shares a sample container garden with the group. By describing the choices that went into making the garden and what it symbolizes to them, the therapist sets the tone for open and supportive communication. Throughout the day, as participants make choices and work on their container, opportunities arise for sharing stories about the loved one with others. If a client chooses a red flower, they may wish to share that “red was always important to my mother, she always wore a red dress” for example. This is the beginning of personal sharing and can lead to deeper conversations. The act of moving through space, interacting with materials and allowing the process to be a guide lowers social barriers and facilitates connection.
- Help the Patient Deal with the Fantasy of Ending Grieving. Worden proposes that two things that patients fear in the idea of “giving up their grief” are: 1. They may forget about the person 2.They may appear to others that they didn’t care about the person. The garden is able to support the client with either of these two fears. If they fear forgetting, they can be comforted that the act of nurturing the garden will allow them a natural time to remember the absent. If they are worried about being perceived as not caring about the absent, a prominent placement of the garden and an opportunity to share about it with others will provide a comfortable way to alert family and friends that the beloved is still very much in their heart.
The garden also provides rich opportunities for valuable metaphor and should be an ongoing topic of reflection with the therapist. If a plant dies, for example, it’s useful to reflect on the fact that sometimes, even if we do everything right, the object of our love does not always respond in the way that we intended. Being perfect sometimes doesn’t change the outcome. The new growth after cutting back a plant can be a way to talk about the new opportunities that can come when we set appropriate boundaries. The seasonal changes can be away to broach topics of aging, seasonal affective disorder and others. A plan should also be in place in the unlikely event that everything in the garden dies. The client should be prepared that this may happen and have a plan in place for how they will handle it. Will they replant the garden with something new? Will they choose a new location and replant? Will they create a “garden” that doesn’t require so much care? How will they plan to cope with this possible loss?
Once the powerful day of garden creation is past, the garden itself becomes part of the ongoing therapeutic process. It can be used in any number of therapeutic interventions. The client can write a letter to the loved one and read it to the plants. The client may play music to the plants and thereby enjoy happy memories of times with the beloved, The client may have chosen plants with a resonant fragrance. The scent may bring back fond memories and sachets of dried leaves or flowers may be made from the garden. If an edible is included in the garden, the harvesting and enjoying of that food can be a powerful ritual of memory and celebration. As each client incorporates the garden into their lives, their own cultures and traditions will be interwoven with it, building in relevant meanings and assisting in their healing.
Supporting self-esteem, physical health, meaning making, social goals, creativity, and connections to the natural world, therapeutic horticulture is a potent tool that therapists can enlist in serving their clients. As we work to slow people down and integrate mindfulness into their daily lives, reconnecting to natural time, the pace of plant growth and change can be transformative.
Finally, Kunitz writes about the ways that engaging with nature, with gardens can dispel loneliness and make us appreciate a life of meaning and connection.
I strongly identify with Henry James when he wrote, in answer to a letter asking him what compelled him to write, “The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life…” One of the great satisfactions of the human spirit is to feel that one’s family extends across the borders of the species and belongs to everything that lives. I feel I’m not only sharing the planet, but also sharing my life… Certainly this is one of the great joys of living in this garden (Kunitz & Lentine, 2007).
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