ABSTRACT
Hospitals are places that are inherently abstracted from the normal course of life—they are places that people go to only in times of exceptional disease, disorder, and crisis. For the majority of the population, the hospital environment is highly unfamiliar in terms of how it looks, feels, smells, and sounds—as well as the emotional and physical sensations elicited by being either a patient or a family member. This chapter discusses how healing gardens can be designed to achieve normalcy, improving users’ experiences with healthcare settings. It offers experiential evidence through the Queensland Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, with regards to the role that hospital external environments can play in going beyond conventional landscape design to create “healing gardens”. A key argument within the chapter is that landscape architecture as a profession has a critical role to play—from concept design through to handover—in championing the integration of healing gardens as a means for health benefits.
