When we stop to consider the towns and cities that we have built around us, it is astonishing how abominable most public landscaping is and how detrimental to the human spirit. How is it that we have we come to a collective agreement to accept it? Why do we make such landscapes that are upsetting and alienating, when they could be intriguing, beautiful, inviting and surprising?
To my mind a therapeutic landscape has a fluency and integrity to it that encourages the person experiencing it to feel differently about themselves. This experience is as diverse as the space and person. What makes a landscape enriching is down to each of us as individual creators. But, while I would resist advising on a particular style, there are basic considerations in creating an appealing environment.
A landscape can be therapeutic in many ways: for the owners, for nature, for the people who build them, for the wider environment and for the future. To create one we have first to consider human nature at its simplest: we enjoy safety, beauty, ease of being, ease of working – elements that encourage us rather than alienate us – and the majority of us are excited by close contact with other benign species and all the natural elements. We also need to be sensitive to our very varied human condition by considering the scope of our ability and frailty: our senses, thriving or failing bodies, complex emotional and cerebral issues.
For example, I once made a garden for a hospice for terminally ill people who had to rely entirely on other people for their simplest mobility. In tandem with the architect we devised a viewing solarium made of glass and completely surrounded by a garden of high grasses and flowering prairie plants. We could bring a person in there on a bed and let nature do the rest ... birds in the grasses could provide hours of improvised and absorbing interest: drama and poetry and intimate connection with nature. Conversations with some of the people in the space bore out that their observation of the tiny bird world transcended, even if briefly, their absorption with the weight of their condition.
Much research is being collated on the beneficial effects of landscapes by the Therapeutic Landscapes Association and others. Formal academic study is extending and validating what we understand instinctively whenever we enter a landscape that is beautiful to us. Hopefully the force of this research will influence legislation and encourage us to be less fettered and make our manmade world a more therapeutic place to be. In the meantime we are all in a position to influence our environment directly and we could be a little less passive about it. Why don't we affect simple pleasant changes? How hard can it be?
Photograph by Andrew Lawson