Gardens For Well-Being In Workplace Environments

We propose that design for healing gardens would benefit from typological study of work-place, religious and health care gardens from cross-disciplinary and international perspectives, theory, and practice (Ward-Thompson, Aspinall, & Bell 2010). Using place and affordance theories, and the perspectives of occupational therapy, environmental psychology, and the history and theory of design, we compare four gardens for different user needs to argue that universal and interdisciplinary approaches to landscape design drive innovation. These are the Rab Psychiatric Hospital gardens, Rab Croatia, the Walter Reed National Naval Military Center, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, gardens for the newly built Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur, Czech Republic, the roof gardens of the Nomura Bank in London