Customer Reviews

Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations (Wiley Series in Healthcare and Senior Living Design)

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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Beautiful organization, research examples to support common-sense recommendations, case studies with pictures, this superb book is the first stop for the healing garden designer. The case studies and design recommendations are grouped by health care setting, which makes the reading more focused. By far the best professional text on the topic.

Conclusion:
Despite it's flaws, it is probably the best textbook available on Healing Gardens.

Pros:
Clear advice to help landscape architects design healing gardens.

A comprehensive discussion of theory.

Cons:
If you want a picture book, this is not for you.

No evidence-based design (because there isn't any)

My first impression of this book was not good. I am a visual person and I wanted to see some large full-color pictures of healing gardens. Instead, most of the images were back & white, small and of mediocre quality.

Many of the images appear to have been taken by amateurs and the inexpensive printing on non-glossy paper did not help.

Yes there is a 14-page glossy color insert in the center of the book, but the snapshots shown were tiny, with 3 or 4 clustered on each page. There was no clear connection from the text to these images.

Site plans are critical to landscape gardening. There were only 35 site plans in this book of 610 pages and like the photographs, they too were small; typically about 4 x 4-inches each and none were in color.

The book's subtitle "Therapeutic Benefits..." and the use of Roger Ulrich as the author of Chapter Two suggests that evidence-based design will be central but it seems that there is not much good research to draw from. Ulrich writes "... very little research directly relevant to gardens has used the types of experimental-scientific methods that are considered sound and persuasive...".

Instead of evidence we have to consider the advice of experts and certainly the two main authors: Clarie Cooper Marcus and Marni Barnes are experts. They also happen to be very good writers. They have clear suggestions for a wide range of healing gardens. They have separate chapters focusing on:
* Acute Care Hospitals
* Psychiatric Hospitals
* Children's Hospitals
* Nursing Homes
* Hospices
* Alzheimer's Facilities

Chapter 11 is called "Getting it Done" and it offers practical advice based on several case studies. It discusses funding and implementation in ways that would be very useful to someone who was meeting with resistance from the hospital administration.

At the end of every chapter there are several pages of references. For those in an academic setting these would be useful.

I might have missed it, but one thing I did not find in the book was: how to deal with gardens when plants are dormant. The two main authors are from the Bay area where the growing season is year-round. However, much of the rest of the planet has distinct seasons. Is it really "healing" to look out into a garden devoid of vegetation for several months a year?

Creo que es un buen punto de partida para comenzar a incluir en el diseño del entorno y el paisaje pautas que incluyan un beneficio directo en la salud de quienes lo contemplan.