Lifestyle - Healing gardens,soothing spaces

VISA RAVINDRAN


Sun, shade and silence are a potent combination to heal bruised spirits.


A place for quiet meditation, a sanctuary from the noise and rush of daily life, is a requisite for urban life and the proliferation of terrace gardens, the premia willingly paid for handkerchief-sized flats with Band-aid-sized greenery and the demand for water bodies and other soothing sound-makers and visual delight providers in interior décor today are all ample proof of our search for a continuous healing influence in our lives.

The Sacred Grove and the Healing Spring are not new to any civilisation, but the urgency with which we seek their benefits today is as much testimony to the distance we have moved away from Nature’s rejuvenating properties as to our realisation that shrinking spaces, crowded public arenas and increasing noise pollution are taking their toll on us and simultaneously narrowing our choice of ways out of their stressful influence.

I first came across the idea of a Healing Garden on a walk from my hotel in Warwick but thought it prudent not to go in alone when I saw a scruffy individual (with an Alsatian) in a semi-torpor, something one accepts in Central London without a thought but that one would certainly not want a close encounter with because of the associations of poverty-drugs-violence. I still hold it against him that he denied me a beautiful hour by just being there!

That inviting vista was evoked once more in my mind as I read an article in SPAN (interestingly, the theme of the issue is climate change) on the “Healing Power of Flowers” in relation to victims of torture, suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The article is about a particular garden raised as a healing tool by the Centre for Victims of Torture, founded in 1985 and headquartered in an old Victorian house, to support victims of political torture and help pull them out of their feelings of isolation, trauma and anxiety, memories and nightmares and stabilise their mental beings by reconnecting them with their family and communities.


Rhythms of nature

The Span article quotes Betty Ann Addison, who designed the garden, as saying that ultimately “gardens are all about transition… illness to healing or life to death.” And embracing the rhythms of nature helps one to accept the inevitability of loss and to find hope in the promise of new life.

Some years ago, in Phoenix, Arizona, a hospital laid out a Healing Garden in a space enclosed by two-storey buildings on three sides and a 12-storey tower on the fourth. The central theme, we are told, is a water feature, symbolic of the cycle of life, with quiet pools and streambeds marking life events. It is disabled-friendly, has a coffee-bar in a corner to help patients socialise and most important of all, the water in the garden gurgles by — visible, audible, touchable. Psychologists like Joseph Ruzek recommend that patients should spend time in Nature, engaging themselves in creative activities. PTSD, they agree, affects the brain in the way it retains/processes memory and drugs can only mitigate symptoms, not cure them.

The qualities most closely associated with healing gardens are continuity, beauty, meditation and sanctuary —qualities everybody needs today in different measure, according to circumstances and one’s own powers of resilience. Sun, shade and silence are a potent combination to heal bruised spirits. June 26 is observed every year as the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

Also called restorative landscapes, sanctuary gardens, wellness gardens and therapeutic landscapes, healing gardens are gaining valuable ground in many long-term healthcare facilities, especially in the United States. Connecting the human mind with Nature has been found efficacious by those who recognise the role of the environment in healthcare. Doctors Terry Hartig and Clare Cooper Marcus, writing in the Lancet, observe that “natural environments better interrupt the stress process than predominantly built settings, even over brief periods,” and proceed to add “…consider the intertwining of place and process. Healing gardens figure in a broad transformation spurred on by recognition of the importance of place characteristics for healthcare.”


Great comfort

Van Gogh, when in the asylum of St. Paul de Mausole in St. Remy, Franc, in 1889, was allowed to wander about the garden freely. It was here that he almost immediately began to paint the famous Iris series.

He wrote to his brother Theo, “…you will see that considering my life is spent mostly in the garden, it is not so unhappy…..For one’s health it is necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.” Considering what a troubled life the artist led, it is not surprising that he found the soothing, healing, calming influence a great comfort.

If we accept the definition of good health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” we have a tough job cut out for us in reaching this goal in a stress-ridden world in the grip of many negative energies. Our lives would certainly be enriched if we could adopt the idea of wellness gardens and nurture our own peaceful oases in our teeming urban spaces.