Sometimes, says Joyce Scott, a person with a mental illness can feel like she's dying inside. That's why Scott likes to work in the greenhouse at Holden House, a mental health facility in Salt Lake County.
"You're alive because you're making something else grow," says Scott, who has hit upon a truth that is gaining credence among health professionals nationwide.Increasingly, local recreational and occupational therapists are turning to something called horticulture therapy to help their patients - the handicapped, the hospitalized, the mentally ill, the elderly - grow well.
"People who are handicapped often don't feel they have control over their lives," notes Kathy Walbolm, a volunteer with the State Arboretum and the University of Utah's Red Butte Gardens. "But here they do have control. If they don't water the plants, the garden dies."
Walbolm is standing in the middle of a garden plot that once was a vacant field off an alley on McClelland Street in Salt Lake City. Several mentally handicapped young adults have just arrived to put the garden to bed for the winter.
Under the direction of Betty Wullstein, the garden was begun three years ago for handicapped teens and adults. Wullstein, curator of education for the arboretum, is a firm believer in the healing power of gardening.
The ill, handicapped and elderly often are cared for, notes Wullstein. But when they're gardening they're the caregiver. And plants, she adds, are non-threatening.
Wullstein runs workshops for health professionals and also works with patients at local hospitals. At Holy Cross Hospital she has done horticulture therapy with stroke patients.
She hopes to establish a greenhouse for physically and mentally handicapped teens and adults somewhere in the Salt Lake Valley. Murray High School has donated an 85-by-25-foot greenhouse, and the arboretum is now looking for someone to donate a piece of property.
The greenhouse, she says, could serve as job training for the handicapped, who would also be earning money by selling their plants at the Red Butte Gardens summer music series.
Horticulture therapy is more well known in the eastern United States, says Wullstein, where some hospitals have horticulture therapists on their staffs. In several states in the Southeast, a program called Tangram trains people with head injuries to become self-sufficient through gardening.
Garden tools have been specially adapted so that people with spinal cord injuries can garden; and in some places gardens have been built at levels accessible to people in wheelchairs.
At Wasatch Canyons psychiatric hospital in Salt Lake City, patients have been encouraged to work in a small vegetable and herb garden.
"Working with the soil seems to be grounding for them," observes Patrick Park, the hospital's therapeutic recreation specialist. "It's something concrete and familiar and something they have control over."
It also gives them firsthand proof that life is full of change and hope.
Linda Hughes has noticed the same phenomenon with the mentally ill clients at Holden House. "A lot of our people have been told for years that they can't do things."
But when they successfully grow a plant from a seed, when they care for it and it blooms, says Hughes, they see that they can do.