Landscape Planning at the Swedish

Her research focus on the connection between man’s health/well-being and the outdoor environment. She deals with both the green structure in the city as well as small gardens at hospitals, schools and workplaces. Stigsdotter is one of the designers behind the Healing Garden at Alnarp Campus and the Solbergapark in Stockholm. Stigsdotter gives courses in environ-mental psychology and horticultural therapy at the Department of Landscape Planning Alnarp. The increase in stress and stress-related ill-health is escalating dramatically in the Western World. An alarmingly growing part of the bud-get for medical services in Sweden is being used for people suffering from different stress-rela-ted ill-health. In this paper, we present some results from a study in which 656 randomly selected people in nine Swedish cities answered a questionnaire addressing their experiences of stress and their use of green outdoor environments at their workplaces. The results may be interpreted as showing that access to a garden at work may have a positive impact both on stress and on ”trivsel”, a Swedish word meaning comfort, pleasure and well-being. Apart from actually being in a garden, a view of a garden may also decrease employees ’ level of stress and affect trivsel in a positive way. According to our results, laying out more and easily accessible gardens adjacent to workplaces could create environments that are more resto-rative and freer from demands and stress