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Therapeutic Gardens

Articles: Therapeutic Gardens

When I was 16 and my mother was just 39, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She lived with the diagnosis and the disease for close to 16 years. Surgical and chemotherapy interventions gave us the gift of those additional years. But in my mind, and I would wager in hers too, strategically deployed gardening interventions also played a major role in her longevity and vibrancy living with the disease at a time when few women with that form of cancer were so blessed.

My mother was flower folk. From early in her life, she gravitated toward plants and as an adult maintained a floral or garden-related career. And we always had a large home garden complete with vegetables, fruit, and—always—flowers.

Mom’s final years were spent in relapse and in rounds of experimental chemotherapy. At that time, my parents lived on the coast of South Carolina; my mother was working in her dream garden by the sea along a tidal marsh. Her three daughters, my father, and my mother’s friends took turns going with her for her weekly chemo appointments.

As anyone who has experienced a chemotherapy protocol knows, the treatments are long, boring, cold, and depressing. And the lon...

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Voices of the West; New Science on Life in the Garden by Frederique Lavoipierre

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