HEALTH & NUTRITION RESOURCES

The Five Seasons Garden is a learning landscape designed to reveal life’s regenerative cycles, our place within them, and how we can participate more intentionally for the well-being of the land, the many beings with whom we share it, and ourselves.Each seasonal garden offers highly nutritious foods and medicinal plants that provide support for that time of year. Many are plants that naturally emerge in that season. Drawing from Classical Chinese Medicine and place-based Indigenous knowledge traditions, we also explore deeper correspondences: how a plant’s color, taste, growth pattern, ecological niche, and medicinal actions may help us understand its relationship and value to a season. When we recognize that our physiology, emotions, and dispositions change with the seasons and that plants have evolved qualities that help living beings meet these seasonal changes we begin to understand that the seasons move through us, not merely around us.We are, in every sense, part of the natural world. The elements live within us. Kinship is not a metaphor. Here, the garden becomes a place to witness these connections at work and, through our educational programs, to explore how they might guide meaningful changes in the ways we care for the land, ourselves, and one another.er.

HEALTH & NUTRITION RESOURCES

The Five Seasons Garden is a learning landscape designed to reveal life’s regenerative cycles, our place within them, and how we can participate more intentionally for the well-being of the land, the many beings with whom we share it, and ourselves.Each seasonal garden offers highly nutritious foods and medicinal plants that provide support for that time of year. Many are plants that naturally emerge in that season. Drawing from Classical Chinese Medicine and place-based Indigenous knowledge traditions, we also explore deeper correspondences: how a plant’s color, taste, growth pattern, ecological niche, and medicinal actions may help us understand its relationship and value to a season. When we recognize that our physiology, emotions, and dispositions change with the seasons and that plants have evolved qualities that help living beings meet these seasonal changes we begin to understand that the seasons move through us, not merely around us.We are, in every sense, part of the natural world. The elements live within us. Kinship is not a metaphor. Here, the garden becomes a place to witness these connections at work and, through our educational programs, to explore how they might guide meaningful changes in the ways we care for the land, ourselves, and one another.er.

The Nature Principle, Human Restoration and the End of Nature Deficit Disorder, a book by Richard Louv is a compelling synthesis of the work of a large number of people that have been focused on understanding our attachment to nature and the living world. He (and many of the people he introduces) suggest that there are qualities in nature that when experienced on a daily basis will improve human well-being and when we make this possible we also begin to facilitate a more sustainable world.
Numen, The Healing Power of Plants is an inspiring presentation of plants as healers. As herbalists have long known, locally grown whole plants have the capacity to heal us and our environment in deep and profound ways. The website includes clips from their award winning film and a compelling narrative.
Plants for a Future Database grew out of the work of Ken and Addy Fern in Cornwall, England. It is an excellently referenced and well-designed database of temperate climate plants with a priority on the food, medicinal and other economic uses of plants.

Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases

Restorative Commons: Creating Health and Well-being through Urban Landscapes, a joint book project of Meristem and the USFS presents numerous case studies and thought pieces from practioners and visionaries exploring the multifaceted relationship between human health and the urban environment. 

The Therapeutic Landscapes Network brings together a diversity of information and resources around landscapes and gardens that promote health and well-being.
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