Gardening and belonging: reflections on how social and therapeutic horticulture may facilitate health, wellbeing and inclusion

The authors completed an 8-week practice placement at Thrive’s garden project in Battersea Park, London, as part of their occupational therapy degree programme. Thrive is a UK charity using social and therapeutic horticulture (STH) to enable disabled people to make positive changes to their own lives (Thrive 2008). STH is an emerging therapeutic movement, using horticulture-related activities to promote the health and wellbeing of disabled and vulnerable people (Sempik et al 2005, Fieldhouse and Sempik 2007). Within Battersea Park, Thrive has a main garden with available indoor facilities and two satellite gardens. All these gardens are publicly accessible. Thrive Battersea’s service users include people with learning disabilities, mental health challenges and physical disabilities. Thrive’s group facilitators (referred to as therapists) lead regular gardening groups, aiming to enable individual performance within the group and being mindful of health conditions and circumstances. The groups have three types of participant: Thrive’s therapists, service users (known as gardeners) and volunteers. The volunteers help Thrive’s therapists and gardeners to perform STH activities. The gardening groups comprise participants from various age groups and abilities. Thrive Battersea provides ongoing contact between the gardeners, volunteers and therapists. Integrating service users and non-service users is a method of tackling negative attitudes to disability and also promoting social inclusion (Sayce 2000). Thrive Battersea is an example of a ‘role-emerging’ practice placement, which is based outside either local authorities or the National Health Service (NHS) and does not have an on-site occupational therapist (College of Occupational Therapists 2006). The connection of occupational therapy theory to practice is essential on any placement (Alsop 2006). The roleemerging nature of this placement placed additional reflective onus on the authors to identify the links between theory and practice. The authors observed how Thrive’s gardeners connected to the spaces they worked and to the people they worked with. A sense of individual Gardening and belonging: reflections on how social and therapeutic horticulture may facilitate health, wellbeing and inclusion