As an extra incentive to our efforts towards a sustainable and green future, our section ‘In the limelight’, showcases interviews with personalities to spur you on! Hear what the experts in their specialised fields say! Be enriched by partaking of their well-gained wisdom and be guided by their first-hand experience.
15-16 May 2017
Sofitel Dubai The Palm Resort & Spa
Dubai, U.A.E.
http://www.landscapesummit.com/
For generations, men who spend too much time gardening have had to defend it to their wives, who wanted them to do something else with their time. It turns out that the best argument was that gardening is good for their health. In recent years, horticultural therapy has expanded the therapeutic effects of gardening to a new level and found new ways that it can help the elderly and patients with dementia.
Garden therapy, or horticulture therapy as it’s also called, is a well-established and very popular therapy that has been proven to be effective in a wide range of situations. It’s quite a broad topic, since it includes the creation of healing landscapes for hospital patients; sensory gardens that stimulate children and adults with developmental disabilities; occupational horticulture therapy that can be done indoors or outdoors to improve muscle strength, coordination, and fine motor skills; rehabilitative therapy that encourages socialization, language skills, and communication; and more.
In different forms and settings, horticulture therapy has been successful therapy for children and the elderly; army veterans and prisoners; patients going through rehabilitation; the developmentally disabled; and adults and children who are unable to communicate, amongst others. This article will focus on horticultural therapy for the elderly, but much of what you’ll read applies equally to many other situations.
Therapeutic gardens and healing landscapes can be used to soothe or to stimulate. Sensory gardens are designed to stimulate, where plants with different scents, colors and textures are carefully chosen and planted in various patterns and designs.
Alzheimer’s patients who are no longer able to communicate or express themselves respond in startlingly positive ways to spending time in a sensory garden, designed to stimulate the senses with different scents, sounds, colors and textures. Aromatic flowers and herbs, variously textured surfaces, ever-green shrubs and flowering plants in different colors and shades all play their part in awakening sensory awareness. Sound is also incorporated into a sensory garden through rustling leaves, running water, and structures built to attract wild birds. Some sensory gardens include the sense of taste, by planting edible herbs, miniature fruit trees, and vegetables that can be picked and eaten.
Soothing, healing gardens can be found in more and more hospitals, as they respond to evidence that patients heal faster and are in a more positive frame of mind if their rooms look out onto greenery or if there are plants in their room. Using evidence-based design, hospitals and hospices create gardens that support and soothe patients. These oases of greenery are carefully laid out to be calming and relaxing, providing an important natural environment for patients and visiting relatives to recharge.
For elderly victims of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, horticultural therapy can be a vital way of defending against further memory loss. It’s amazing to see the memories that are brought back just by being in a garden. The sight of a tree blowing in the wind, the sound of tinkling water, the smell of herbs in the hot sun – all of these are powerful memory triggers. People who bring their loved one to a memory sensory garden are often astonished by the recollections that their relative comes up with. The sights, sounds and smells of nature do not change much over time. There is a deep-seated familiarity to them, which is calming to the dementia patient who feels as though nothing can be relied on to stay the same.
Another form of horticultural therapy is active participation in gardening tasks. This form of occupational gardening therapy is very versatile. Many senior care homes now offer accessible therapeutic gardens and/or greenhouses so that residents can benefit from the therapy of caring for them. Accessible gardens use raised beds and low-hanging baskets that residents in wheel-chairs can reach easily, and ergonomic tools that are more comfortable for weaker or arthritic hands to grasp. With these adaptations, even the frail and elderly can take part in garden therapy tasks such as planting, pruning, weeding and watering.
Sometimes, people are put off horticultural therapy because they are worried about making the activity accessible enough, or are concerned about the weather or safety issues. While all of these concerns are valid, they are easily surmountable. Even seniors who are bed-bound or in climates where it is often impossible to go outside can enjoy gardening therapy. Building an accessible greenhouse is the best solution, but even tending a houseplant on the windowsill or a miniature container garden brings many of the benefits of horticulture therapy.
Garden therapy has a number of benefits for older people. Caring for a plant together encourages bonding and socialization, and stimulates communication as people share their memories and experiences of gardening. It is sadly easy for the elderly to retreat into themselves as they age, becoming more and more focused on their inner world and increasingly cut off from what is going on around them. The responsibility of caring for a tomato plant, for example, forces them to focus on the needs and requirements of something other than themselves, which opens their horizons to include more world around them.
Having a plant to care for can be more meaningful than you might expect. A senior who now needs help with many activities of daily living can feel helpless and despairing. To move from being an active agent of change in your life and the lives of those around you to being the subject of someone else’s care and decision-making can cause despair and depression among many seniors, regardless of whether that change was provoked by the onset of dementia, a sudden accident, or the gradual effects of aging. Garden therapy returns the senior to a position of strength and power, albeit in a limited gambit, since now he/she is the caregiverinstead of just the recipient of care.
Horticulture therapy brings many other benefits to seniors and everyone else too, for that matter. Spending time in the open air and interacting with fresh plants and flowers is soothing and refreshing for everybody and lifts your mental state. Gardening improves motor skills and dexterity, coordination and balance, and muscle strength too through activities such as digging, careful pruning and weeding, while there is really no comparison to the sense of achievement when a geranium flowers or a crop of tomatoes ripen.
Why You Need To Bring Plants Into Your Home
Bringing greenery & plants in your home isn’t just beautiful, it’s also good for you.
I’ve been learning from an interior designer friend all about a new design trend, which isn’t really that new at all. It’s called biophilia, and like all the best things, it’s an old wisdom dressed up in new clothes. Biophilia means the love of all living things, and biophilic design means bringing that love of nature into our home design choices. Here are her words about why incorporating greenery and plants in your home will be good for your physical, mental and emotional well-being. And that’s something that we all need:
Plants appear to be everywhere right now. Open almost any design magazine or blog and you’ll find interiors filled with plants.
Increasingly, they are becoming an integral feature in the home, as more and more people rediscover the beauty of greenery and how it can be used to enhance the decoration of any room.
But plants are so much more than just another interior trend. Because as well as looking attractive, there are many more benefits to having them.
So here are ten good reasons to have plants in your home:
The quality of air indoors is often more polluted than the air outside, as it becomes trapped and stale. But did you know that plants can help to filter out air pollutants?
According to NASA, they can remove toxins and chemicals from the air. And because most plants release oxygen during photosynthesis, they increase the amount of fresh and clean air in your home too.
Research has found a link between airborne pollutants – like dust – contributing to fine lines and facial wrinkles. But as mentioned, some houseplants help to filter harmful chemicals and dust from the air, thereby improving the radiant appearance of your skin…
The BBP has released a new commercial green leasing standard to deliver better sustainability outcomes for tenants and landlords.
The green leasing standard is a world-first, aimed at helping landlords and tenants benchmark their agreements against others and save on power and water bills.
The BBP leasing standard is an online tool developed for landlords and tenants, allowing them to indicate the ‘green’ credentials of proposed leases. The score of a lease is determined by measuring lease clauses against 20 categories including Energy Management, Performance Standards and Sustainable Transport. The online tool enables leases to be assessed, and a lease scorecard and rating badge generated.
The associated scorecard and badge make it easy to identify the strength of sustainability of the proposed lease and compare it against other leases.
City of Sydney CEO, Monica Barone said the demand for green leasing was at an all-time high, with market uptake of the leases growing at 10 times the rate we saw in the 2008–09 financial year.
“While owners and tenants may not be able to build all 20 categories into the lease, they have the option to work together and agree on a set of clauses achievable by both parties over the life of the lease,” Ms Barone said.
DEXUS Property Group, one of the BBP’s founding members, launched its Simple and Easy Lease in 2016, which incorporates green lease provisions.
“DEXUS is committed to optimising the environmental performance of its buildings and the BBP leasing standard helps us communicate this to our customers. We are pleased that our new lease is scored as gold under the BBP leasing standard, which is the highest level available,” said DEXUS Head of Group Sustainability and incoming BBP Chair, Mr Paul Wall.
The BBP leasing standard has also been applauded by the Property Council of Australia Chief Executive Ken Morrison.
“This is a good initiative by the City of Sydney’s Better Buildings Partnership that can be rolled out around Australia. It’s an example of business and government working together to achieve strong outcomes in terms of energy usage, waste, standards and compliance,” Mr Morrison said.
“It recognises that the leasing of most commercial properties is not a case of ‘set and forget’, but it is an active partnership between landlords and tenants. These clauses can fit easily into standard lease agreements and we’ve seen a good take up in leases over the past two years,” Mr Morrison said.
As International investors and the local market increasingly demands greater levels of transparency, standard clauses such as these have a clear role to play. The BBP’s leasing standard will help property owners demonstrate their proactive engagement with tenants, drive improved environmental outcomes and reduce outgoings for both landlords and tenants.
