Horticultural Therapy

Horticultural therapy, also called garden therapy or social and therapeutic horticulture, uses gardening activities to promote human healing and rehabilitation. Therapeutic use of gardens has ancient roots, including Mesopotamian gardens around 2000 BC and Persian paradise gardens designed around 500 BC to engage the senses, and in the United States physician Benjamin Rush, regarded as the father of American psychiatry, documented the positive effects of gardening on patients with mental illness in the nineteenth century. The practice was formalized in the twentieth century through Veterans Administration occupational therapy programs after the Second World War, the first dedicated academic degree in 1972, and the founding of the National Council for Therapy and Rehabilitation through Horticulture, later the American Horticultural Therapy Association, in 1973.