"It's called Horticultural Therapy—HT to professionals, garden therapy to the rest of us. The English psychiatrist Benjamin Rush invented it as a way to treat psychological problems, cognitive disorders, and motor difficulties through plants and flowers. The Americans and British have been studying and practicing it for years. Here in Italy, it's still new. The only center devoted to teaching the theory and training professional practitioners is HT Italia, located in Castellamonte, near Turin." So read an article in a major newspaper, and I thought to myself that the people running the Don Guanella Institute for Women on via della Nocetta must have been true pioneers. About twenty years ago, they created what they call the "Garden Workshop"—which I visited with Nicole just this morning.
We were welcomed into a bright, colorful workshop by three educators: Aurelia, Stefano, and Luisa. Together with Paola, Norma, Vincenzina, Gianna, Sandra, Claudia, and eleven other residents of the institute, they make up the current garden-workshop group. Twenty people altogether.
Their workshop, like the other nine in the institute, operates every day—four hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. The participants rotate through this workshop and the others according to schedules set by the medical and psychopedagogical team, taking into account each resident's preferences and needs. While we talked, the young women—some younger than others—sat around a table working on an activity reserved for days when the weather is bad or the earth needs rest. They were composing beautiful multicolored flowers from colored resins and wire. These pieces, they assured us, sell as fast as they can make them. They can't keep up with orders or get them ready for the sales exhibitions in time.
They told us that the actual gardening work begins in January. In small seedbeds inside the greenhouse, they plant zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, and herbs. In March, these seedlings are transplanted into small pots and moved to the cold greenhouse.
"By mid-April—we're running a little late this year because of the rain—the plants go into the ground. They mature in June and July, but the tomatoes," Aurelia and Stefano said with justifiable pride, "keep producing right through November."
Some of the women, the ones most suited to and passionate about agricultural work, labor for a few hours in gardens outside the institute and receive a small wage. One of them, Claudia, drawing on her experience, suggested planting potatoes in the workshop's vegetable garden. Last February, a bit behind schedule, potatoes were planted there for the first time. They're expecting a good harvest.
We step outside, part of a small procession, and discover the garden hidden behind high walls—all green and gold in the sunlight, with carefully tilled rows, a flowering gazebo, and fragrant shrubs. Hidden away, steps from via Olimpica, it feels like a small miracle. The larger greenhouse still shelters young tomato and basil plants ready for transplanting, and rows of succulents line the shelves in neat order. We visit the small cold greenhouse too, improvised with whatever materials the workshop members could gather, where "mature" plants sit safely in terra-cotta pots. Then we're shown the flowers. The little rosebushes are full of buds; the iris and hyacinths have already faded; the hydrangeas are verdant in the shadiest corner. They explain that hydrangeas, ferns, geraniums, and carnations are kept in pots, moved in and out of the greenhouse as needed. The bulbs, roses, and tall daisy shrubs are planted directly in the ground. The hardier plants, like marigolds, are sown straight into the soil, but the delicate ones—hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, roses—are propagated from cuttings.
Vincenzina, Norma, Paola, and all the others have grown comfortable with us. They show us everything with pride and tell us that some of the flowering plants were given by friends, or reproduced from cuttings, or handed over by the sisters—but only when they're in truly bad shape, really dying, no longer fit for the chapel or the reception rooms. Those plants need care and encouragement. You have to talk to them, they say, so they'll come back to life and bloom again. We breathe in the scent of mint, rosemary, and the white-flowering shrub that decorates the rustic gazebo. Maura, who was restless, pacing back and forth in the workshop, is now quiet and absorbed, raking fallen leaves and grass clippings with a long rake. In a shady corner we notice mysterious bales of straw—empty now, but covered with mushrooms not long ago. Another successful experiment.
By the time we say goodbye, we're already good friends. Nicole receives a rosemary plant as a gift; I'm invited to Paola's birthday party. Vincenzina tells us they'll soon be preparing for summer trips to the seaside or to Tuscany, to the countryside. The faces around us are relaxed and smiling—starting with the three educators, who seem genuinely pleased with this work, convinced they're doing something good, content to talk about it with their students.
The illustrious English psychiatrist Benjamin Rush would have been proud to see this.
- Nicole and Tea, 2000