Category — Horticulture Therapy

By The National Trust
2009

Excerpts:

Gardens connect people with food

21 per cent of people have taken up gardening to grow their own fruit and vegetables.

The Trust now cares for 26 working kitchen gardens, from Trengwainton, Cornwall, to Wallington, Northumberland. At the magnificent 2.5 acre kitchen garden at Knightshayes Court in Devon we work with local schools who now come on a regular basis to tend their plots and learn about growing
food.

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In this December 1914 photograph, a British soldier of the London Rifle Brigade poses proudly behind his garden, festooned with stoneware rum jugs (on the extreme right). In the months to come, this location at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient in Belgium would become the scene of horrific fighting. From the NPR website – from Imperial War Museum.

Kenneth Helphand published Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime in 2006.

“Kenneth Helphand, writes about war gardens — not just victory gardens, grown in time of scarcity, but those planted on hostile fronts, including Eastern Europe’s ghettos and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. Helphand calls the gardens an act of defiance.”

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Aboriginal Community Kitchen Gardens at UBC Farm, Vancouver, BC

Since 2002, members of the Musqueam First Nation have grown vegetables on the farm site for their community kitchen project. With an interest in expanding the potential benefits of this community nutrition project, the farm initiated a new pilot program in 2005. In collaboration with 17 different agencies working on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a plot of land on the farm is dedicated towards the DTES Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project.

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All the way from Byron Bay, Australia, Lesley Bayliss describes an herb business she started for people with intellectual disabilities. Part of the program is funded by the herbs that clients grow. Sales are upwards of $50,000 per year, all grown on a half acre of land in an industrial area of town. Over 150 varieties of herbs for sale:

Bush Tucker
Lemon Myrtle (backhousia citriodora)
Davidsons Plum (davidsonia pruriens)

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See a short-documentary on guerrilla gardening starring Richard Reynolds, the author of “On Guerrilla Gardening.” The piece basically shows the process, preparation and troops needed to go out on a gardening mission.
From Current TV.

Link with comments on Current TV here.

What do you do on a rainy Vancouver summer day? You turn to crafts in the garden. Maria picks some lavender and makes it into something useful.

A Vancouver Urban Designer, Planner and Landscape Architect recounts her experience with gardens during her recovery from cancer.

“Having had cancer has allowed me certain freedoms I never had prior to my illness. One of those freedoms is the ability to talk openly and candidly about my experience. This piece entitled ‘The Spirit of Healing’ comes from a place deep inside. A place from which we all have the ability to seize and harness energy, but a place few of us tap into until we are confronted with a crisis in our lives. How each person harnesses his or her ability to heal is as different as each person is different.”

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