23rd Annual Southern California Spring Garden!
Show Costa Mesa, California

April 26-29, 2012

HOURS: Monday to Friday 10am – 9pm, Saturday 10am – 8pm, Sunday 11am – 6:30pm

This year’s theme is HEALING GARDENS!

Come to our first brainstorm and info meeting on Monday, November 14th at 7:45pm in the Horticulture Department. Bring ideas, magazine clippings, sketches, your creative mind!

Theme Description
“Healing Gardens”

Gardens have been used as places of healing throughout history, and in the last several years, interest in healing gardens has been renewed. We invite you to create such a garden for our 2012 Southern California Spring Garden Show display garden competition.

What exactly is a healing garden? Mara Eckerling, in the Journal of Therapeutic Horticulture, defines a “healing garden” as simply “a garden in a healing setting designed to make people feel better”. A healing garden can be a place for therapeutic contemplation or grieving. It can be a sanctuary for meditation and a space for soothing and rejuvenating a visitor’s mental and emotional health. It can also be a place to strengthen physical well being when designed to encourage movement along pathways or provide bending and reaching motions by the tending of garden beds.

Healing gardens are likely to be found at psychiatric hospitals, children’s hospitals, medical centers, nursing homes and Alzheimer’s treatment centers where they soften and bring nature into the institutional environment. Also falling under the “healing garden” heading are hospice gardens, gardens for the visually impaired, meditation gardens, enabling gardens, sensory gardens, and gardens for horticultural therapy.

So you see, there are lots of ways for you to interpret the theme “Healing Gardens”. You may decide to create a garden intended for an institutional setting, or one that is designed just as your own personal restorative refuge. After all, we can all benefit from some quiet time spent in a natural environment after a hectic day.