Lover’s Lane Pool at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.
Roger Foley
Beatrix Farrand, one particular of America’s best landscape architects, was born 150 decades back. The anniversary arrives at a excellent time to celebrate her function: many of her crucial gardens are going through comprehensive restoration, a formerly non-public backyard garden is now open up to the community, and a lavishly-illustrated biography is heading for publication.
Beatrix Farrand
Beatrix Farrand Culture Archives
At age 27, Farrand was the only girl of 11 founders of the American Modern society of Landscape Architects in 1898. Her aunt, only 3 several years older and a near mate, was Edith Wharton the two women had considerably in widespread, together with keen minds, a finely developed aesthetic feeling and membership in New York’s social, cultural, and financial elite. The two women’s maiden names had been Jones, as in “Keeping up with the Jonses.”
“She was a exceptional and outstanding lady who, like her aunt, built an critical profession for herself in the course of a time and in a milieu where by females did not do that,” says Judith Tankard, the Boston-primarily based author of Beatrix Farrand: Backyard garden Artist, Landscape Architect released by Monacelli Press on March 29, 2022. “Not only did women from her qualifications not have professions, but landscape architecture was completely a man’s globe.”
The moon gate at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Maine.
Larry Lederman
Farrand discovered an early mentor in Charles Sprague Sargent, a botanist at Harvard College and the founding director of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts. She commenced practicing landscape architecture in New York in 1895, locating consumers among the her mother’s and aunt’s social connections. Her get the job done quickly captivated discover and she became the first consulting landscape architect at Yale College, Princeton College, the College of Chicago and other faculties. She developed the first East Garden at the White House (famously redesigned by Bunny Mellon and Melania Trump.) The rose backyard garden at the New York Botanical Back garden in the Bronx is her design, and she is justly celebrated for her incomparable work at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. On Very long Island, in Connecticut and on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, wealthy homeowners hired Farrand to develop gardens to compliment their grand manses.
3 very distinctive Connecticut gardens built by her are getting restored, such as Hill-Stead and Harkness Memorial State Park, which are open to the public.
The boxwood route at Dumbarton Oaks
Roger Foley
The back garden she made for Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in Seal Harbor, Maine in 1926 is the unusual non-public backyard that has been meticulously maintained and is practically unchanged. Now just one of the homes of a landscape non-gain, it is open up to the community from mid-July until early September via on-line reservations.
Browsing any of Farrand’s extant or recreated gardens is a delightful lesson in scale, proportion, color, horticultural practice and the development of vistas, as very well as simple fears this sort of as exactly where paths need to go, what elements finest suit the internet site, how the back garden is to be utilised and how it is to link to the residence. Farrand was a fantastic designer, but she was also a experienced vegetation man or woman and an helpful supervisor of personnel. She did not shy absent from tough bodily work, and was recognised for her no-nonsense do the job outfits, which involved stout boots.
The New York Botanical Garden’s Rose Back garden
Mick Hales
Tankard will promote her e book with a series of lectures, together with at the Back garden Conservancy and the Institute of Classical Architecture and Artwork.
“I desired to tell the life tale of this extraordinary girl,” she suggests. “Besides her great design and style work, she opened doors and produced a profession route for ladies. Now, fifty percent of the pupils at landscape architecture faculties close to the state are girls.”
Maintaining up with backyard garden trends this year is a get for us and the setting as nicely with landscape architects foremost the way. According to a attribute by Damian Holmes in the January difficulty of “World Landscape Architect,” the craze is towards putting the environment front and heart.
That said, it is local climate improve that is primary the charge in how professional landscape designers are approaching their tasks.
“We have recently found extra venture perform is dedicated to mitigating weather transform in the United states of america,” the write-up states. The article goes on to say: “The mitigation initiatives will include a wide spectrum from transforming land administration techniques to small initiatives this sort of as laws governing the color (sic) and reflectivity of surfaces.”
Making use of this idea at property could include a assortment of ways — from averting “blacktop” asphalt driveways that take in warmth to roof-area colors to considering drinking water-conserving products or back garden installations, such as rain gardens, swales or a “green roof” for back garden or other constructions to conserve drinking water and mitigate heat reflection.
One more factor the execs will be looking at is higher emphasis on the price of outside place.
For professional spaces this indicates: “People will spot bigger price on out of doors spaces as areas to exercise, relax, fulfill, dine and recreate,” the post states. “Industries (primarily arts and enjoyment) will start out to see smaller sized outside situations are ways to get persons to show up at comfortably, this will area bigger strain on parks and open up areas in cities. Will indoor stadiums and large enjoyment venues keep on to attract the crowds? Or will the expectation be that a lot more occasions will have to have to be held outdoor with lesser crowds?”
Of training course we are already looking at this come about as COVID troubles proceed constrict indoor activities, and with predictions of the possibility of continued public health and fitness problems like the COVID pandemic, it becomes noticeable that business spaces will start out to conform with the demands of the general public in get to retain people today safe and nutritious. Our personal encounters are by now mirroring this trend.
How numerous of us have planned out of doors occasions in the earlier year or two, to still delight in the organization of our pals and kin although preserving them and ourselves as harmless as feasible? No doubt numerous of us are contemplating or by now have seemed at approaches to lengthen our residing spots out of doors as temperature makes it possible for. The attractiveness of outside fire pits and free of charge-standing outside heaters and spots focused to out of doors eating no doubt attest to this want.
Specialist landscape designers are anticipating property owners to initiate design makeovers to facilitate higher use of outdoor spaces. We can expect to see expanded use of native vegetation in industrial landscapes, and there are loads of explanations to contemplate this observe at residence as nicely.
Minimizing carbon footprints and working with workers shortages in these making an attempt instances has experienced landscape designers searching for techniques to lessen backyard garden upkeep. Amen to that we say! Indeed peaceful battery-operated power garden instruments this kind of as chainsaws and mowers are one way we residence gardeners can be part of the corps having the sounds down a notch or two. And definitely setting up to facilitate companion planting of species that have equivalent drinking water demands and care demands can help lessen the workload.
The article states: “There is a will need to enhance biodiversity, not just plants but also soil biology, to preserve and give ecosystems for individuals and animals … Planting layout and soil must be front of head, in particular when it is increasingly tough to attain specified vegetation as commercial nurseries seem to be lowering the selection of plants readily available (in favour of color (sic) or flowering cultivars) to the business.”
Even the subject of weeds has captured the pros: “Much has been composed about the gains of weeds in city environments in making habitats, having said that, landscape architects want to acquire a higher comprehending of which weeds are invasive and noxious as these weeds can have a devastating environmental and economic impression. The trend in weed administration will go past the management time period during the building phase and will need a holistic approach across the whole venture period from begin by way of to servicing … Several will think that this is not a pattern but some of the tenets of landscape architecture, we will see a higher emphasis from governments and communities on conservation, biodiversity and weed management as equipment to mitigate weather improve.”
A different pattern for the coming calendar year is colour! Just about every year the Pantone color enterprise names a coloration of the yr. The new one for 2022 is Veri Peri. Here’s what Pantone has to say about this colour which we can anticipate to see a whole lot of this calendar year — each within our homes and outdoors in our gardens.
“Displaying a carefree self confidence and a daring curiosity that animates our imaginative spirit, inquisitive and intriguing Pantone Pretty Peri aids us to embrace this altered landscape of opportunities, opening us up to a new eyesight as we rewrite our life. Rekindling gratitude for some of the attributes that blue signifies complemented by a new standpoint that resonates right now, Pretty Peri locations the potential ahead in a new light-weight.
“We are residing in transformative situations … Quite Peri is a symbol of the worldwide zeitgeist of the minute and the transition we are likely by means of. As we emerge from an intense time period of isolation, our notions and benchmarks are transforming, and our physical and electronic lives have merged in new means. Really Peri illustrates the fusion of present day lifetime and how colour trends in the electronic globe are being manifested in the bodily entire world and vice versa.”
Hope to see out of doors accents in this perky colour as well as bedding vegetation to help distribute the cheer the Quite Peri represents.
Lynette L. Walther is the GardenComm Gold medal winner for crafting, a 5-time recipient of the GardenComm Silver Medal of Accomplishment, the Countrywide Garden Bureau’s Exemplary Journalism Award, and she is the creator of “Florida Gardening on the Go.” She is a member of GardenComm, the group of experienced back garden writers. Her gardens are on the banks of the St. Johns River.
Landscapers offer 8 resourceful thoughts for a ‘Garden Party’
Visions of tea sets, floral preparations and maybe even some twinkling lights could possibly pop into most people’s minds when they consider of a backyard celebration.
Nevertheless, the eight landscaping companies who established substantial yard displays for the Spring Dispatch Home & Garden Show were a little bit — and in some conditions, a lot — extra imaginative for this year’s Yard Occasion concept.
Wandering by means of the gardens at the Ohio Expo Middle, guests will see a movie theater concession stand with an apothecary-like candy screen and a bench created from the tailgate of an previous Ford truck, best for observing the big video game.
There is certainly also a whiskey-pouring h2o element (it’s actually iced tea) and a amazing orchid-coated pergola along with pizza ovens and tailor made-concrete stovetops.
Tom Wood of Wooden Landscape Companies in Columbus even invented a new yard sport named Tree Ball, fashioned from the trunk of a maple tree and a copper pipe, just for the display, which opened Saturday and operates as a result of Feb. 27.
Wooden Landscape also bundled cornhole, bocce ball, Link 4 and hopscotch in their design, which centers on Recreation Night time.
For very first-time participant Delagrange Landscaping and Common Building, the obstacle of making a Family members Movie Evening scene that was impressive but also reasonable proved to be a enjoyment endeavor.
“We required folks to be capable to walk into the backyard garden and imagine this room in their backyard,” mentioned Jason Bornhorst, vice president of structure and gross sales for Delagrange, which is positioned in Howard, Ohio, in Knox County. “We failed to want it to be a display screen but have persons acquire tips, steal thoughts from it.”
A extra modern pattern in landscaping is that out of doors spaces can mimic indoor spaces with televisions, couches and whole kitchen parts for cooking, Bornhorst continued. With a theater-dimension display screen under a tin-roof structure surrounded by attractive stone and wooden operate, the Delagrange team tried to do just that in their backyard.
“We designed a space that is upscale — like a concluded basement,” Bornhorst said. “Like an individual desired a film theater, but they designed it outdoors as a substitute of in their basement.”
The staff at Ryan’s Landscaping also brought Tv-observing outside as they labored with the theme of Yard Tailgate.
Ryan Harrell, owner of the Delaware small business, reported tailgating and yard functions are currently a huge section of the society with his employees so it was not a extend for them to perform inside the category.
“We considered, ‘We presently do this, but let us kick it up a notch and do it inside for everyone to see,'” Harrell claimed.
Kicking it up a notch meant installing artificial turf, fashioning components of an aged Ford truck into seating and making a drinking water function out of cornhole boards. Their backyard also features all-natural stone work — walls, pavers, bar — for which the corporation is regarded.
“Setting up for this begun again in May well,” Harrell continued. “We experienced month to month Zoom conferences that went to biweekly and then, weekly. You can find a lot of exertion powering the scenes past what the set-up is.”
The eight companies associated all commenced assembling their months of layout do the job in the Celeste Heart starting early Monday.
All the difficult function is value it, contributors said, not only for the organization sales opportunities and advertising, but also the camaraderie the occasion produces with their personal staff doing work on 1 frequent task as nicely as with the limited-knit central Ohio landscaping neighborhood.
Though putting ending touches on his company’s Whiskey Tasting scene, Jacob Basnett of Landscape Design and style Alternatives, could marvel at the Backyard Marriage remaining assembled throughout the aisle by Oakland Nurseries or the nearby Tuscany Wine Soiree from Seely’s Landscape Nursery.
Basnett, co-proprietor of the Hilliard company, explained they performed off the concept of “anything is better with age,” utilizing additional rustic-hunting materials in their backyard garden. And they employed whiskey barrels anywhere they could.
“We have a whiskey-barrel drinking water feature … the arbors are sitting down in whiskey barrels,” Basnett stated. “We turned them into tables with chairs and there is certainly a barrel light hanging.”
Basnett explained their business enterprise has designed a yard the past 8 years because it stretches their techniques and enables them to present off their imaginations a little bit.
“We get to display our creativeness to potential purchasers,” Basnett reported. “If they dream up an thought, we can do it.”
Echoed his company lover Charlie Vickers: “We do not get to do this in real lifetime, at minimum not all at as soon as.”
award@dispatch.com
@AllisonAWard
At a look
The Spring Dispatch Home & Backyard garden Show runs as a result of Feb. 27 at the Ohio Expo Centre, Interstate 71 and East 17th Avenue. (It is closed Tuesday, Feb. 22). Several hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., other than Sundays, which are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (The function is shut on Tuesday.) Masks are strongly inspired. Admission is $8, or $10 at doorway, and free for young children. Price reduction coupon codes are out there at Lowe’s. Parking is $5. To invest in tickets or far more facts, stop by www.dispatchshows.com.
The scenery has improved in the century since Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver founded the first landscape architecture firm owned and operated by women in the Pacific Northwest.
Home gardeners who rely on the region’s expansive nursery offerings, landscape professionals who continue to find inspiration in Lord and Schryver’s timeless designs and even tourists who appreciate billboard-free highways have these women to thank.
They were “progressive and concerned about the public aesthetic,” said Bobbie Dolp of Salem, who helped preserve Gaiety Hollow, Lord and Schryver’s former Salem home, garden and studio, which is open to the public. Another estate they enhanced, Deepwood, is now a Salem city park.
In all, the partners designed more than 200 public and private landscapes and gardens between 1929 and 1969. They introduced many rose cultivars and once-uncommon shrubs such as English boxwood to the region, and they persuaded local growers to propagate other plants that have become garden mainstays.
But Lord and Schryver did so much more.
The women started their landscape architecture business, a profession dominated by men, the first year of the Great Depression. And they succeeded.
Over their 40-year careers, they hosted a radio gardening show, wrote newspaper articles and lectured across Oregon and Washington, providing horticulture advice that endures today. During World War II, Schryver taught advanced landscape design at Oregon State University.
They planned residential landscapes, from mansions to modest homes, and they served on state planning commissions, city parks advisory groups and tree committees. Billboards blighting Oregon roads in the 1930s led to their volunteer advocacy work on the Oregon Roadside Council.
Lord and Schryver “raised the standard of landscape design in the Northwest,” said Libby. “They created simpler layouts with the toughest of plants for limited city budgets. Their concern for the public landscape, the landscape everyone has the ability to enjoy, became their greatest gift to the Northwest.”
Visitors to Gaiety Hollow, operated by the Lord & Schryver Conservancy, can imagine the partners’ prolific lives.
The professionally trained landscape architects, who knew site engineering, drafting and botany, refashioned classic European styles to achieve a look of informal formality on former farmland. They popularized the idea of strolling through a series of garden “rooms.” And they researched plant materials and often tested new introductions in their own garden.
Both women graduated from Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women in Massachusetts, one of the first colleges in the world to open the profession to women (now part of the Rhode Island School of Design).
Their paths to college did not overlap. Lord was born into a prominent Salem family; her father, William Paine Lord, was Oregon’s ninth governor and state Supreme Court judge; her mother, Juliet Montague Lord, established Oregon’s first garden club. Elizabeth Lord attended the landscape college starting in 1926 when she was in her late 30s and after her parents had died.
Schryver‘s childhood was more humble. Her father, George Schryver, ran a restaurant at the Kingston, New York railroad station and her family lived in an apartment over the restaurant.
Although 14 years younger, Schryver graduated from Lowthorpe in 1923 and had worked five years for New York landscape architect Ellen Shipman before taking a sabbatical and joining the college’s European Travel Course tour in 1927.
Schryver was 26 when she met Lord, 39, on the tour. Two years later, they set up their business in Lord’s hometown of Salem.
They continued to circled the world together and study horticulture up close to become plantswomen. Their tremendous knowledge and efforts led to new design techniques and trends.
“They did exactly what they should do to have the career they wanted,” said Ann Amato, a propagator at Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island and Secret Garden Growers in Canby. “They got an education and travel in the 1920s, which required guts and money. They showed they were brave and adventurous.
“It was big, bold, modern and smart,” continued Amato, who writes the blog Amateur Bot-Ann-ist, “for these two women to stake a claim here.”
View of the Flower Garden from second floor of at Gaiety Hollow (2020). Courtesy Mark Akimoff.OSU Press
Elizabeth Lord said in 1973 of her lifelong personal and professional partnership with Schryver, “We joined forces, desiring to try out a new venture of real garden designing and planting, domestic and park planting.”
Each project was unique, but the landscape was always an extension of the structure it surrounded. The women, who worked without hiring an employee, preferred to collaborate with an architect to maximize landscape space, optimize natural light and frame trees and views.
Garden rooms, which open directly off a dwelling, were “beautiful spaces, elegantly proportioned to the dimensions of the building and subtly planted,” stated author Libby. “Schryver would extend lines from the edges of the building to determine the perfect location and size of outdoor spaces.”
Lord excelled at plant combinations, Libby added.
The distinctive garden rooms were connected with circulation pathways and directional hedges. A reflecting pool, statue or other permanent decorative element was installed as a focal point.
Their two-story Colonial Revival-style residence and studio were constructed on a lot that was the former garden adjacent to the Lord family’s mansion. Here, the partners created garden rooms that were engaging, practical or contemplative, from a grassy space with flagstone steppingstones where laundry was hung to dry to a complex parterre flower garden.
As plantswomen, Lord and Schryver cultivated relationships with regional nurseries to select plants with seasonal interest and a relationship to the overall grounds.
The West Allee at their residence showcases lilacs, rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and hydrangeas. A pergola, with a bench to relax and enjoy the view, is covered in clematis in spring, roses in summer and grapes in fall.
Wallace Kay Huntington, the late landscape architecture of the respected Huntington & Kiest firm in Portland, was a Lord and Schryver protégé and friend.
In speaking of Gaiety Hollow, Huntington said, “Anyone who conceives of a formal garden as static has only to study the calculated interplay of spatial relationships in this tour de force of garden design.”
He admired the effective “geometry of the compartmented schemes” and the quality of the fencing, arbor and other elements.
In 1980, Huntington updated Lord and Schryver’s vision for the garden at the Portland Garden Club. He also contributed to the landscape restoration of Deepwood Museum and Gardens in Salem.
Lord died at age 88 in 1976 and Schryver remained in their home until she died at age 83 in 1984.
The firm’s professional papers are archived at the University of Oregon.
Historian Laurie Matthews wrote in the Historic American Landscapes Survey that Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver pushed the boundaries of landscape architecture beyond design theory. But that may not have been their goal.
”They were simply,” stated Matthews, “designing sophisticated and highly crafted residential and public landscapes in the Pacific Northwest.”
The Deepwood Museum and Gardens, with grounds designed by Lord & Schryver, is a Salem city park that is open daily to the public.Deepwood Museum and Gardens
Most of Lord and Schryver’s projects were in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland and Salem, but they also worked in Corvallis, Eugene, Klamath Falls and Pendleton as well as Walla Walla, Washington.
Gaiety Hollow:The nonprofit Lord & Schryver Conservancy organizes garden events and docent-led Garden Tours at Gaiety Hollow, 545 Mission St., approximately one mile southwest of the Oregon State Capitol building.
The Lord & Schryver Conservancy Neighborhood Garden Tour is scheduled for June 4-5 in the Salem-Fairmount area. Four of the 12 gardens on the tour were designed by Lord and Schryver. For more information, call 971-600-6987, email info@lordschryver.org or visit lordschryver.org.
Deepwood Museum and Gardens: Lord and Schryver started their decade-long collaboration with Deepwood property owner and hobby gardener Alice Brown in 1929. Today, the five-acre, Salem city park at 1116 Mission St. SE, two blocks east of Gaiety Hollow, retains its original gardens with a metal “birdcage” gazebo, hexagonal teahouseand iron scrollwork.
The park, with Formal Gardens and Grounds & Nature Area, is open sunrise to sunset daily and is free to enter. Check the Event Calendar for special event closures and the reopening of the museum home tour. For more information, call 503-363-1825 or visit deepwoodmuseum.org.
Learn more: Valencia Libby, author of “The Northwest Gardens of Lord & Schryver,” published by Oregon State University Press, will speak live on Zoom during a Garden Conservancy virtual program from 11 a.m.-noon Thursday, Feb. 10 ($15 general admission; $5 Garden Conservancy members).
The title “landscape architect” was first publicly used by Frederick Law Olmsted, who co-designed New York City’s Central Park in 1857. The second Olmsted generation of landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his stepbrother John Charles Olmsted, promoted the City Beautiful movement from their firm based in Brookline, Massachusetts.
John Olmsted also crossed the country to design the fairgrounds for Portland’s 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Expedition and created the master plan for the city’s public park system.
But before he did, John Olmsted was one of 10 men who founded the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899. They were joined by one woman, Beatrix Farrand, who designed the original White House Rose Garden.
Lord and Schryver were founding members of the Oregon chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Today, women represent 35{6d6906d986cb38e604952ede6d65f3d49470e23f1a526661621333fa74363c48} of the more than 15,000 members of the American Society of Landscape Architects. President Eugenia Martin, a landscape architect in Ohio, and others on her team have initiatives to increase diversity, equity and inclusion.
For the Cosmos Foundation, environmental conscience, ecological conservation, and community focus form the foundations of land planning and landscape design within public infrastructure projects. We sat down with the foundation’s project director, Felipe Correa, as well as foundation architects Valentina Schmidt and Consuelo Roldán, as they went in depth on the benefits, objectives, and motivations behind the Healing Gardens initiative.
Nature’s Place Within Hospital Infrastructure
Throughout the conquest and colonial times, plants held a central place within hospital architecture, especially within sanatoriums specializing in the treatment of tuberculosis and mental illnesses. As time passed, however, natural spaces disappeared from medical buildings in Chile and the rest of the world, thanks in part to the Hygienist Movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. For the past few decades, however, scientific research has mounted evidence against the Hygienist methods in support of re-incorporating nature into healthcare, since, “in many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medicine” (Sacks, 2019). This research could–and should–revolutionize hospital architecture through a new understanding of how the human body works and its connection with its surroundings.
Hogar del Pequeño Cottolengo. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
Healing Gardens: A Way of Incorporating Nature into Health Centers
While nature heavily influenced early hospital architecture, it’s therapeutic potential has largely been ignored within modern medical paradigms, due largely to sanitation policies and budget restrictions. Nevertheless, throughout the 80s, various studies were done that demonstrated the necessity of reincorporating natural elements into hospitals.
The wide range of scientific studies as well as the empirical evidence gathered in hospitals indicate that reincorporating natural elements into hospitals will prove to be a monumental task. Given the amount of perspectives supporting their therapeutic potential, Healing Gardens offer a solution. The initiative aims to integrate Healing Gardens into healthcare systems via public policy, setting the foundations for reconnecting humans with the environment.
Hogar del Pequeño Cottolengo. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
The Healing Garden offers a natural space within a healthcare facility for patients, family, and hospital staff. Its design aims to bring the benefits of the outdoors into the hospital, adding to the physical, psychological, emotional, and social elements of wellbeing and maximizing patients’ recovery. (Jardines Sanadores, 2019).
In the same way that medicine understands the human body as a unit that doesn’t focus on a singular organ to heal the entire individual, it should also understand that the individual and their recovery process is connected to their environment. In keeping with this understanding, reestablishing nature’s place within the healthcare system is essential to changing the overall paradigm and much of this transformation starts with the infrastructure and architecture of health facilities.
Hospital Clínico San Borja Arriarán. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
Three Points to Consider in the Development of Healing Gardens
Through the ten experimental Healing Gardens placed in hospitals throughout Chile, the Cosmos Foundation has pinpointed three essential elements when planning for future spaces in other healthcare facilities.
Nature’s place within spaces for healing and recovery
Sanatorio Marítimo San Juan de Dios. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
In Roger Ulrich’s 2002 paper titled the Health Benefits of Gardens in Hospitals, Ulrich highlights the connection between aesthetics and emotions and how garden design can create spaces that enhance a human being’s connection to nature and thus optimize their recovery and overall health.
The aforementioned study took place in the Healing Garden and Memorial of the Maritime Sanatorium of Viña del Mar, in the Valparaíso Region of Chile, and looked to study the benefits of the garden for both the patients, mainly children with severe neurological injuries, and the staff at the facility. Nestled in a gorge with sweeping ocean views, the 1.300m2 site provides an ideal space to relax and connect with the surrounding nature. Taking into consideration the conditions of the patients and the layout of the space, the project participants determined that the existing fruit trees would provide optimal sensory treatments and then designed three work spaces within the garden all connected by a walking trail, allowing visitors to experience an array of colors, smells, and textures during their time in the space.
Hogar del Pequeño Cottolengo. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
The garden features an area with pomegranate and lavender plants with for hands-on exploration and a space for workshops and horticultural therapy, where participants can participate in the sewing and harvesting of plants and witness actively witness their lifecycle. This not only provides an educational experience for the young patients, but allows them to develop their motor and sensory skills as well.
The last area within the garden provides a space dedicated to emotional healing, an ever-growing need for the surrounding community. The space is lined with thickets of verbena, pepper trees, and soapbark, which separate it from the main area of the garden. Birdhouses were installed to attract birds to space, allowing visitors to enjoy birdsong as a part of their experience within the garden.
Sanatorio Marítimo San Juan de Dios. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
Incorporating natural spaces into hospital infrastructure will facilitate effective, sensory-based therapeutic practices proven to benefit the human mind and body. More importantly, current national trends make it more possible than ever to incorporate this spaces into the national health system.
Nature as Patrimonial, Communitarian, and Healing Infrastructure
Findings by Vidal and Pol (2005) regarding environmental psychology indicate that an important element of feeling part of a social group is feeling connected to physical spaces significant to said group. The Cosmos’ Foundations builds on this concept in their research on rehabilitation within healthcare communities that highlight the importance of empowering individuals through exposure to the native ecosystem.
Hospital Clínico San Borja Arriarán. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
A clear example of this is the Jacaranda Healing Garden at the Children’s Neuro-Psychiatric Service of the San Borja Arriarán Hospital in Santiago, which treats more than 30,000 patients annually. This 1,600m2 space houses the original trees from the hospital’s old garden, including six Phoenix palms that precede the building’s construction. For the surrounding community, these trees became a part of the local collective subconscious, denoting not only the history and heritage of the building but of the community itself and the experiences lived by its members within the hospital. This made the palm trees a focal point for the creation and layout of the healing garden and they served as the markers for the distinct areas within the garden, such as the spaces for meditation, sensory activities, physical therapy, and workshops.
Hospital Clínico San Borja Arriarán. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
In the case of gardens within historical hospitals, plants often harbor a connection with the local community and the incorporation of local flora into landscape and architectural project should focus more on plants’ place within local health customs than on their aesthetic qualities.
Nature in Hospital Infrastructure
There is evidence that some elements of exterior design have significant impact on the clinical results of patients (Rubin, 1998).
Another such garden can be found at Pequeño Cottolengo, an institution located in the Cerrillos Commune of Santiago that specializes in the care of mentally disabled individuals. Many of its residents have limited mobility and can’t independently visit the green spaces on the institute’s grounds so, to give them access to a nature area, the garden was designed without divisions or barriers between spaces. The space consists of two gardens connected by a sheltered terrace that allows residents to enjoy the garden even when it’s cold or raining. This also allows patients who can’t go outdoors to visually enjoy garden within a space that can accommodate their needs.
Hospital Clínico San Borja Arriarán. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
A great deal of research has indicated that people who feel in control of their circumstances demonstrate higher stress management and better overall health than individuals who feel they have little power over what happens to them (Evans y Cohen, 1987). This perceived loss of control yields negative results within treatment, especially when patients perceive they have no ability to decide where they go, what they do, and are placed under constant supervision with no time to themselves to relax or pursue their own interests (Taylor, 1979; Ulrich, 1991, 1999). Healing gardens aim to alleviate this restrictive environment by breaking up the monotonous routines of the patients, giving them the freedom to move about and explore in a safe, private, and relaxing space.
Other research has shown that, in many cases, people who have greater social support experience less stress and better health than those who face isolation and fewer social connections (Shumaker y Czajkowski, 1994). At Cottolengo, this support is provided by the staff, whose needs were also considered in the project’s design. These considerations led to the creation of a relaxation space, where the staff can interact with each other and build their support systems (Marcus y Barnes, 1999). The staff’s space includes shaded benches surrounding a fountain, offering both scenic and auditory relaxation experiences to give them a respite from the hustle and bustle of the workday.
Planimetría Hogar del Pequeño Cottolengo. Image Cortesía de Fundación Cosmos
In this context, vegetation serves as a design element able to transform otherwise inhospitable areas into comfortable, relaxing environments that benefit everyone, including those suffering from both physical and mental ailments.
Looking Forward: Nature within Hospital Infrastructure
Not only do plants aid in stress and pain reduction, but they also add to sleep quality and decrease the likelihood of reinfection, resulting in both decreased hospitalization times and costs (Ulrich: 1990). For these and many other reasons, nature within hospital infrastructure should become a fixture in all areas of the national health system.
Firstly, it has been demonstrated that it is necessary to bring hospitality back to hospitals; in other words, return to the origins of health-centered architecture and incorporate research-based natural elements into our health infrastructure. This starts with a cultural shift in both how we design and build hospitals and how we plan and apply therapies, implying a trans-disciplinary approach applied across both the architectural and medical field.
Secondly, this cultural shift should be bolstered by public policies based on current scientific evidence. This means that changes are not limited to only the nation’s prestigious medical institutions but are made available to any and all who desire or require them. Conversely, if government entities disagree with said evidence, this will not only result in monetary losses but the potential loss of life. Luckily, the implementation of nature into Chile’s hospitals is effectively possible.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, these changes are more needed than ever. In times of epidemics and pandemics, humans have aligned with and distanced themselves from nature on a cyclical basis. The question is, where are we in the cycle currently? Will designers and healthcare professionals be able to advocate the scientific evidence and overturn existing cultural notions that hold back health and healing? Given this historic and complex time we are living in, the answer remains unclear but the opportunities are bright. In the words of Alexander von Humboldt, “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation” (Humboldt, 1807:43). In essence, nature is a living ensemble within which all organisms are intertwined in a network driven by dynamic change: the cosmos. (Wulf, 2015:293-308)
Now has never been a more opportune moment for hospital architecture to shift and realign itself with its naturalistic roots and incorporate nature into its design, resulting in a holistic and healing approach to modern healthcare.
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About the authors:
Felipe Correa Tagle
Architect, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, 2005. Publications include “Planificación de la Precordillera como Plataforma para la expansión de los Parques Urbanos: el caso del Parque Natural Cantalao Precordillera” (published in From The South/Desde el Sur: Global Perspectives on Landscaping and Terrain, Sciaraffia et al, Chile, 2019). He has been a professor of Architecture at the University for Development. Since 2014 he’s been the Project Director for the Cosmos Foundation in Chile.
Valentina Schmidt Escobar
Architect, University of Chile, 2011. Fullbright and CONICYT Scholar for Master in Urban Design, University of California Berkeley, USA, 2017. Her publications include San Francisco Bay: Adaptation by Design, jointly published by the University of California Berkeley and the Architecture School at Delft University of Technology, 2016-2017, She is the co-author of the book Ephemeral Urbanism: The Landscape of Temporary Cities, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2015-in the process. She has been an assistant professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Chile. Currently, she serves on the architectural team of the Cosmos Foundation.
Consuelo Roldán Diethelm
Architect, Masters of Landscape Architecture from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, 2017. Masters Thesis presented at the 10th Landscaping Biennale in Barcelona, 2018. Roldán is a professor of City and Landscaping at the University for Development in Chile and has been an instructor for the Masters in Terrain and Landscaping at the Diego Portales University in Chile as well. She is part of the architectural team for the Cosmos Foundation.
