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Chicago Botanic Garden
Horticultural Therapy Services

For more than 20 years, the Chicago Botanic Garden has been at the forefront of the horticultural therapy field. Horticultural Therapy Services is a major provider of training in this specialized profession, and its program serves as an example to other institutions throughout the country and around the world.

Horticultural Therapy Services provides direct programming on-site at the Enabling Garden as well as off-site at Chicago-area health care and human service agencies. The horticultural therapists on staff also provide technical assistance and training workshops to horticultural therapists and human service professionals.

Enabling Garden

The Enabling Garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden has received worldwide recognition for its innovations in barrier-free gardening techniques. This beautiful display garden demonstrates ways to make a garden fully accessible to people with disabilities. It has the following features:

• raised beds
• vertical gardens
• hanging baskets
• plants with sensory attributes
• a display of enabling tools

This garden is a wonderful place to see the concept of barrier-free gardening put into practice. The 11,000-square-foot Enabling Garden has many state-of-the-art elements. See its unique features on this Web site!

Programs

Contract Services

The goal of promoting human well-being through plants forms the basis for the Chicago Botanic Garden's Horticultural Therapy Contract Services. Since 1977, the Botanic Garden has assisted over 100 human service facilities to establish gardening programs for people of all ages. These facilities include rehabilitation hospitals, residences for older adults, special education schools, schools for people with visual disabilities, psychiatric hospitals and correctional facilities.

The year-long contract services program provides the following:

• Weekly gardening programs, outdoors spring/summer and indoors fall/winter
• Program materials that include tools, plants and supplies
• An outdoor garden planted and maintained with clients
• A light unit for indoor horticulture projects
• Lesson plan books for the year-round program
• Training workshops for two staff members

For further information or an application, please call (847) 835-8250, e-mail horttherapy@chicagobotanic.org or click here.

Educational Opportunities

The Chicago Botanic Garden offers classes, symposia and special events on the therapeutic use of horticulture, including enabling gardens and horticultural therapy. Please consult the horticultural therapy calendar of events for current offerings. To order a packet of information about group programs at the Enabling Garden, click here.

Consulting Services

The Chicago Botanic Garden's Horticultural Therapy Program provides consultation services throughout the United States in these areas:

• Horticultural therapy program planning and design
  The horticultural therapy staff assists health care and human service agencies in developing horticultural therapy programs.
  
• Barrier-free landscape and therapeutic garden design
  The horticultural therapy staff consults on the application of horticultural therapy methods to the installation of landscape designs. The focus is on wheelchair-accessible garden structures, including appropriate pathway surfaces, raised bed gardens and adapted vertical and hanging garden planters.
  
• Plant selection
  The Horticultural Therapy staff can provide expertise about sensory plants and their uses in programming.
  

Publications

Horticultural Therapy Services publishes a range of resources, including fact sheets, articles and activity guides for planning horticultural therapy programs. A new series of publications created by the Chicago Botanic Garden, Garden for Life, includes "Horticultural Therapy: Helping People Grow," "Designing Your Home Enabling Garden," "Sensational Plants," "Horticultural Therapy Resources" and "Enabling Tool Resources." Click here for an order form.

For information about the Garden's horticultural therapy programs and consulting services, please call (847) 835-8250 or e-mail horttherapy@chicagobotanic.org

Horticultural Therapy Services at the Chicago Botanic Garden is generously supported by an endowment created by the Buehler Family Foundation and a grant from the Grant Healthcare Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Retirement Research Foundation, Dellora A. and Lester J. Norris Foundation, Edmond and Alice Opler Foundation, Elizabeth Morse Genius Charitable Trust, Mr. and Mrs. James A. Babson, Bertha Lebus Charitable Trust and Winnetka Garden Club.