ABSTRACT
Inpatient psychiatric care facilities often are associated with lovely outdoor spaces. The treating psychiatrist framed the concept as a behavioral intervention: accompanied by a nurse, Donald would be allowed to visit the garden briefly, once a day, staying within the locked gates, following any several-day period that passed without violence. The benefits of gardens are widely known: the cardiovascular effects of exercise in fresh air, the multisensory pleasures of seeing, smelling, touching, and hearing, the uniquely comforting embrace of sun and soil. Therapeutic group talk particularly agitated Donald; he wouldn't tolerate any kind of conversation about health, or feelings, or appropriate strategies for behavioral control. Donald's erratic behavioral swings indeed seemed to epitomize the characteristic paradox of teenagers: the yearning, on one hand, to take in the wide world, to absorb it and digest it, to make all of it their own - and the craving, on the other hand, to crack everything apart and break free from familiar confines.
