What should be included in a healing garden to make it a truly healing environment? Clare Cooper Marcus, an expert on healing gardens, provides clarification about what they really are:
“The term ‘healing garden’ refers to a variety of garden features that have in common a consistent tendency to foster restoration from stress, as well as other positive impacts on patients, visitors, staff, and caretakers. To qualify as a ‘garden,’ the feature should contain prominent amounts of real nature . . . . to justify the label ‘healing,’ a garden should have therapeutic or beneficial effects on the great majority of its users.”
