Nature Studio has been quietly brewing a plan to relocate. For the last eleven years, the studio has facilitated over twelve thousand sessional places in horticultual therapy and supported landscape designs for scores of projects. However, although there is much sadness at lifting out our London roots, it is with excitement and anticipation we have Read more…
Nature Studio is recruiting Land Girls. Digging not for war, but for good health. Land Girls are welcome to the practice in Finsbury Park/Crouch End in a pioneering one-to-one horticultural therapy course running up to 25 weeks, for a weekly 60 or 75 minute session, on Wednesday afternoons from April to November. Rebecca will walk Read more…
Gardening is mainly experienced without words. Perhaps a grunt when heaving a load, or a cry of delight at the sight of a bird is as is much as a stint outdoors creates. A newly-arrived Eyptian gardener stopped in his tracks to take in a pepper plant, fruit and all. He smiled, lingered, and Read more…
‘Entering the polytunnel is like stepping into another world. Its like going through Mr. Ben’s dressing room door’. Thomas, community gardener. What is it about polytunnels? Or greenhouses, sheds and other-worldly outdoor dens? Traditionally the sanctuary of ’im outdoors, the hen-pecked hubbie in the 1970s mind-set of The Two Ronnies. But everyone enters the polytunnel Read more…
I am collaborating for the first time with a team showing a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Come to your Senses Eco-Therapy Garden combats the detrimental technical overload children often experience today and reconnects them in a garden that plays on the five senses, to restore good mental health. The garden is sponsored by Read more…
James Tilly Matthews, architectural plans and explanatory notes for Bethlem Royal Hospital, 1810-11 In a radical exhibition, an arching history of the treatment of the mad at Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam, forces us to review how future treatment should be. Within this the Madlove project, led by people with mental illness, Read more…
On closer reading, some of the painters at the Royal Academy’s current exhibition ‘Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse’ reveal a love of gardening for therapeutic purposes: Claude Monet is quoted with ‘Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe it to flowers that I Read more…
The Winter season is now with us, so we must rest. The gardening tasks have dwindled to a saunter into the bare bones of a slumbering space. Enjoy the exposed garden structure, it reveals a lot about the garden beyond the froth of Summer. Walk. Breathe in crisp air. It is timely to reflect Read more…
Hooray! Our garden installation is nearly ready: the plaster cast walls are being dabbed with final touches of plaster, our plants are bulking up nicely, the surprise ornaments are shouting to get out of their packaging, and the printers have run off the hospital signs. It has been a labour of love over the last Read more…
Our garden installation for ‘Taking a Turn’: mental health history of hospital gardens will be open to the public from 18 May – 5 June 2015 at Exchange Square, London EC2. The garden explores the archives of mental health hospital gardens with contemporary voices from patients at Bethlem Royal Hospital on the original site Read more…