Quand jardiner soigne
(Revue du livre Quand jardiner soigne de Denis Richard. Encore merci à François. Malheureusement, je l'ai écrite en anglais pour une newsletter américaine sur l'hortithérapie).
A French doctor praises the virtues of « hortithérapie »
Denis Richard, a department head at a mental health hospital in Poitiers, France and a teacher at the local medical school, is also an avid gardener. In this alternatively theoretical and practical book, he sets out to convince his countrymen and fellow health practitioners of the benefits of gardens on physical, mental and spiritual health. The French, he admits, have fallen behind in this particular therapeutic field. But first, he recounts the history of the « jardins ouvriers » of the 19th century which were meant to keep the working classes out of trouble and other earlier paternalistic approaches to community gardening. At the end of the book, he writes at great length about the universal importance of gardens as paradise in cultures and religions across time and space. For him, the spiritual dimension of gardening is what gives the practice its healing power, a point he makes more adamantly that the usual HT literature in the US.
In between these historical and spiritual sections, he reviews the different populations that can be helped in the garden as well as basic considerations in setting up a healing garden. All this will sound familiar to HT Institute students and, as a matter of fact, Richard mostly quotes from American literature including Simson & Strauss. In conclusion, the book quickly describes 8 French healing gardens, most of them designed for elders by Anne Ribes who seems to be the star of horticulture therapists in France. While the author doesn’t explain why the French have fallen behind (he vaguely invokes a cultural difference in how gardens and green spaces are perceived in France), he believes that the current search for a renewed relationship with Nature makes this the perfect time to discover « hortithérapie » both to heal patients and to stay healthy because we have “a natural empathy for living things”.
Quand jardiner soigne (When gardening heals), Denis Richard, Delachaux et Niestlé, 2011
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