Restorative Gardens

The Healing Landscape
by Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs, Richard Enoch Kaufman, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

Winner of a 1999 Merit Award given by the American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards Program.

Restorative gardens for the sick, which were a vital part of the healing process from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, provided ordered and beautiful settings in which patients could begin to heal, both physically and mentally. In this engaging book, a landscape architect, a physician, and a historian examine the history and role of restorative gardens to show why it is important to again integrate nature into the institutional settings of modern health care facilities.

Nancy Gerlach-Spriggs, Dr. Richard Enoch Kaufman, and Sam Bass Warner, Jr., present six American health care centers that cherish the role of their gardens in the therapeutic process. Among these are community hospitals in Monterey, California; a full-care mental institution in Philadelphia; a nursing home in Queens; a facility for rehabilitative medicine in New York City; and a hospice in Houston. The authors make a persuasive case for including gardens as a vital part of any medical setting.

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