Why we need gardens to refresh our body and spirit
“As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process.”
-Oliver Sacks
For nearly 40 years my work has been to recreate and transfer the benefits of the garden into a business space. Now, I’m beginning to think I missed it. Live plants are a beautiful interior furnishing, much like artwork, but it’s their ability to connect us to our self that I’ve minimized.
The acclaimed neurological physician Oliver Sacks writes… “I take my patients to gardens whenever possible…” and “I have found only two types of nonpharmaceutical “therapy” vitally important – music and gardens.”
Dr. Sacks goes on to explain the value of gardens:
“As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”
Oliver Sacks
Live plants in your business is not the same as a walk in the garden, but this hardly needs to be an either/or choice. You can have both live plants in your business and take a walk in nature and you’ll very likely experience the refreshing of your body and spirit.
*Source: “Why We Need Gardens” in Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales
