Therapeutic Landscapes uniquely brings together historical and contemporary debates on the use of the garden as a therapeutic space. Hickman narrates the story of the landscapes associated with psychiatric, general and specialist medical institutions and asks what did they look like, how were they used and how did this relate to medical concepts? It traces the history of these gardens from the grottos, Chinese galleries and summer houses of elite nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, through Florence Nightingale's championing of the Victorian pavilion hospital design with its courtyard gardens, and the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets. It concludes with a discussion of new hospital gardens being created by designers such as Dan Pearson in the twenty-first century. This book will be essential reading for those interested in the histories of place, space and material culture, and in particular medical historians, garden historians and historical geographers.

A richly illustrated exploration of how late Georgian gardens associated with medical practitioners advanced science, education, and agricultural experimentation As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation's public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.