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Anatomy of a Healing Garden02-01-01 | 16
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Healing gardens raise an age-old question. What does it mean when we identify something as beautiful? With some minor deviations, we all generally agree on the qualities that describe beauty such as symmetry, order, and complexity. Yet, beauty goes beyond the merely superficial to embrace a visceral response to the environment. Beauty, in a manner of speaking, is the experience of health through nature.

What many designers (and physicians for that matter), are beginning to appreciate is that the human body is more than the sum of its parts. The body has extension. Physical and mental health is a function of how the body moves and is moved by nature. Yet, the influence of environment is so subtle and yet so pervasive that we are largely unconscious of its effect.

Everything in the garden was designed from a child's point of view. The metal walls were laser-cut with animal shapes so that the setting sun would cast interesting shadows on the ground. Laurel True designed the mosaics for the starfish shaped bench. Manufactured tiles were placed on a Styrene form by the artist in the Pique-Assiette style.

One philosopher has likened the situation to asking a fish whether it knows it is swimming in water. If the fish could speak it would confess an innocence of the concept of water because it is the medium in which it lives. It has no sense of an existence that is not perfused with water. Similarly, we are unaware of the medium in which we spend our own existence. It's an invisible shroud that eludes us because it is all around us and within us, an immanent part of our lives.

Origins

Healing gardens are an ancient phenomenon. In the fourth century BC, Greece had healing centers or aesclapia devoted to the god of medicine and healing - Aesclapius. Many temples were erected to him on high mountains and near healing springs all over Greece. Three major shrines were dedicated to him. They were on the island of Kos, in the city of Pergamon, and at the temple and theater of Epidaurus, in the eastern Peloponnese south of Athens. Vincent Scully, the great American architectural historian, has made the following comment about Epidaurus and the relationship between the natural landscape of the site and its buildings:

The whole of the universe of men and nature [came] together in a single quiet order to be (healed).

 The entrance to the garden is a giant, 12 meter long (40ft-long) and 6.5 meter high (21ft-high) climbing frame for trumpet vine called 'Sam the Dinosaur'. He was created by Andy Jennings and was named after Sam Burt, a four-year-old boy who has had 20 operations in the course of his treatment at the hospital.

In the third century BC Aesclapius' emigrated to Rome. Here his shrine was consecrated on the Tiber Island. There, in the tenth century, relics of Saint Bartholomew endowed a church and a hospice for healing. during the twelfth century, while staying at this hospice in Rome, King Henry II of England was inspired by the vision of his jester, Rahere, to found a sister healing center there. The hospice was founded in England in 1132 and is known today as Saint Bartholomew's Hospital, London.

Footnote to History

Healing gardens are not relegated exclusively to the dust bin of history however. Current medical knowledge recognizes the benefits of sanitoria, and the substantial curative rewards that can be gained from quiet meditation. Some designers are beginning to return to these ideas about medicine and have constructed living clinics for seriously ill patients. The Bloch Foundation, for example, has constructed 17 Cancer Survivor Parks throughout the United States since 1978. (See "Cancer Survivor Parks", Landscape Contractor Magazine, November/December 2000, pg 66) One of the emerging talents in this field is the artist, Topher Delaney.
One of the creatures featured in the garden (at right) is a giant sea horse fountain rising from a sea-blue concrete floor, gently shooting jets into a shallow pool. The fountain mosaic was designed by Jessica Abbott who used handcrafted and custom glazed tiles.

The designs for private gardens created by the San Fransisco based T. Delaney & Co. have often emerged from the personal narratives of its clients. The result of this approach is a personalized, 'client-specific' design. Delaney and her colleagues closely examine the client's past, their likes and dislikes, current preoccupations, and any specific interests or obsessions. Often the Delaney will include trees, shrubs or flowers that recall happier times.

Delaney has designed three healing gardens in California. One is at the Highland Hospital, East Oakland, in an extremely poor Afro-American section of the Bay Area. Another, in Palo Alto, is specifically designed for Alzheimers Syndrome patients. Delaney has recently installed a large healing garden at the Beth-Israel Hospital in New York. The first of these healing gardens had its genesis in Delaney's own life - an aspect of her own personal narrative. She fought and won a battle with cancer while in the Marin Cancer Center near San Francisco.

At the center of the building was a courtyard, a dull, soulless, concrete-walled, open space where she decided to make a perfect interior garden. Climbing plants furnished the walls, and raised planters made scented plants more accessible to patients. The centerpiece is a beautiful, Japanese-inspired fountain reflecting the influence of the Orient on Californian culture. The fountain consists of two large, natural stones, one which acts as a support and one which is angled down to a round, carved bowl to contain the water. Over time, the fountain has taken on a symbolic significance. Many of the patients fill their cups and glasses there, hoping that the gently flowing water will help in some way with their cure.

Scars into Stars

Delaney' s latest creation is the Leichtag Family Healing Garden at the San Diego Children's Hospital. The garden is on the site of a former car park and covers 5,000 square feet of land with arabesques of color, splashing water, and brilliant mosaics. The Healing Garden in San Diego is unique in that it was built entirely from donated funds, labor and materials. Paul Hagin, who is the director of facilities at the hospital, was responsible for much of the fundraising. He also enlisted the help of an agency that specializes in the employment of high school students in crisis, who built the walls dividing the different areas of the garden.

"It's a place to imagine life being larger than what's existing at the moment. Most gardens are about miracles of life, but this one deviates from the traditional," says Delaney.

The designers have approached the elements of the garden - the colors, shapes, textures and, above all, the scale of the features - from the child's viewpoint. The children feel an immediate rapport with the cartoon and computer-game colors of lemon-yellow, deep blue, lilac and burnt orange that wash the sinuous, undulating walls surrounding and intersecting the garden space. The walls form a series of garden rooms with nooks and crannies where families and staff can gather in privacy.

"When the doctors can't heal anymore, your heart and your soul still need to be healed, and this is the place for it," said Deborah Burt, the mother of Sam who has had intensive treatment there.

The garden is designed to offer a safe, imaginative, uplifting and above all, meaningful environment for convalescent and terminally ill children and their families. Periodically, the hospital staff and the families gather in the garden for a ceremony that they call 'The Celebration of Life'. It is an opportunity to praise the children who have died and those who are still convalescing in the hospital.

The child's view of this fantasy world is expressed in the garden in many ways. The entrance, which establishes privacy and sanctuary, is through the giant, open-work, painted metal legs of Sam the Dinosaur. Sam is 12m (40ft) long and 6.5m (21ft) high. He was created by Andy Jennings and was named after Sam Burt, who has had 20 operations in the course of his treatment. Today Sam is doing well and the dinosaur remains as testimony to the battle that he fought, and is a constant symbol of hope to other children who are struggling with illness.

Other creatures featured in the garden include a giant sea horse fountain rising from a sea-blue concrete floor, gently shooting jets into shallow pools.

Jessica Abbott used handcrafted and hand glazed tiles to create the effect of movement. There is also a rainbow-colored windmill with mechanically driven birds inside its open structure.
This presentation plan shows the final design development of the healing garden. Delaney designed private spaces for the children and their families within the brightly colored perimeter walls. Palm, magnolia and eucalyptus trees provide shade in the garden.

Within the garden, the Celestial Wall is decorated with the signs of the zodiac and the Constellation Wall is inset with 158 glass stars glowing in the afternoon sun. Other walls have cutouts in the shape of ducks, horses, bats and mice casting scampering shadows on the ground and providing a focus during the day for partially sighted children. The glass is warm and bright, attracting little hands during the day. At night, the glass beasts are back-lit by colored concrete spheres representing the planets on the edge of the street so that they can also be seen from the hospital windows overlooking the garden area.
The nine, hand-packed concrete planets are hollow on the inside and hold a Hydrel (Sylmar, CA) 9100 series, recessed light fixture which illuminates the colored glass discs inset in the concrete wall. The Constellation wall was built by at-risk teenagers who participated in a mentor program to learn a trade.

The garden's ground planes of crushed granite are swirls of soft, sandy ochres, yellows, blues and teal greens inspired by the shore and the waves of the Pacific Ocean. The dust-on coloring was provided by Atlanta, Georgia manufacturer L.M. Scofield.

This stalking mountain lion silhouette is one of the many animal cut-outs in the metal wall sections among the bright concrete perimeter walls. The animals cast shadows onto the swirling cement ground plane's sea and sand colors.

There are plenty of places to sit and relax in the garden: mosaic seats, concrete starfish benches, movable wheelbarrows with fixed umbrellas and 'rainbow' rocks were created for families to enjoy the medicinal plants and butterflies in a passive environment.

Three small lawn areas are used for picnics. Shade and height are provided by mature palms and eucalyptus; large bird-of-paradise plants continue the bold colors and fantasy themes. The plantings reflect a tropical motif because they have fewer allergens.
Nearly 350 ceramic tiles, handcrafted by Martha Hevanston, were affixed to the gardens walls to represent the fauna and flora of San Diego. The tiles were painted by the artists at Topher Delaney's firm.

Within the garden is a story-telling room for the hospital's resident story-teller. On its walls the shadows of animals are cast by large metal cut-outs. Story-telling is an antidote to the clinical confines of the hospital, providing both a welcome distraction to the children, and short-term mental solace for visiting parents. This and other areas of the garden bring to mind images from twentieth-century art based on colorful, abstract fantasy - the works of Joan Miro, Antoni Gaudi and Niki de Saint-Phalle.

The garden has been a great success and has been extended to provide a haven for severly handicapped children who can now share its beauty with other children and their families. LASN
The custom designed wheelbarrow benches are made of brightly painted wood and include rubber wheels for moving the bench around. The attached umbrella was specified from a McMaster/Carr tractor accessory catalogue.
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