Pine Rest offer behavioural health services in Michigan and Iowa. With registered Horticultural Therapist Betsy Brown I visited the gardening project in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Betsy offers horticultural therapy to women who are in drug and alcohol rehabilitation at the ‘Garden of Hope’, which is located on the Pine Rest site.
The Garden of Hope was named by service users from Pine Rest and is fenced off area which is set out in a series of long allotment style beds used to grow vegetables and flowers.
Me and Betsy Brown in the Garden of Hope
As well as providing productive activities away from the center Betsy focuses on using plants and gardening to symbolically represent life troubles and how to work through them. An example of this was when a woodchuck ate and damaged a large amount of the sunflowers that had been planted. Instead of reacting to this and clearing the bed that day the sunflowers were left and after three weeks had started to re-grow. Betsy used this to talk about their lives and what it takes to heal after being beaten down and broken.
I was fortunate enough to observe a session which started with service users tasting some zucchini bread that they had made last week from the zucchinis (courgettes) they had grown in the garden this summer. We then went to the garden where service users gave a tour of the garden, explaining plants and what had grown well, what had not and what each others jobs were. The group worked together to plant a winter pansy display in one of the beds.
It is only one session of between 1-2 hours per week but a lot gets done in the garden and the women obviously gain a lot from it. Volunteers assist to keep the garden maintained throughout the week.
The Travelling Horticultural Therapist 