Aligning therapeutic gardening approaches to five levels of mental health and wellbeing

This report by the Therapeutic Horticulture Stakeholder Group (2024), produced with input from clinicians and other experts, aims to assist gardening providers to identify the level of mental health need that they are able to support.

In this report, the authors use the ‘5-levels of mental health’ model, developed as part of the NHSE Green Social Prescribing test & learn site in Nottingham, as a framework for describing mental health needs and explores how gardening activities at each level can be differentiated in terms of:

• Who it is for

• Why it should be used

• How the individual will engage in the gardening activities

• What skills, quality assurance and evaluation processes the gardening provider will need to have in place

The report includes a detailed table of these four aspects of a gardening activity as applied to the five different mental health levels. A further table describes five case studies illustrating how gardening activities can be aligned to the five mental health levels.

View the report here