data, “the cost-benefit savings is quite high,” said Grahn. “They go
from seeking primary care thirty times a year to ten.” The program is
so successful that the Swedish government pays for it and is
beginning to replicate it elsewhere. There is a long waiting list to get
in.
Grahn is now studying the garden’s impact on traumatized Syrian
refugees and stroke patients. About 30 percent of Sweden’s health-
care dollars go to mental health, but stroke care is even more costly.
Typically, patients learn to rewire their damaged brains through lots
of repetitive speech and occupational therapy, but it’s slow and
exhausting work. This is where the gardens come in. “There are no
established methods of treating mental fatigue,” he said, “so we hope
we can find a way of treating it for this group. And we hope the
environment can help patients find new ways of functioning. A speech
therapist takes an apple and says “apple,” and shows the object. But in
a natural environment, patients can talk and smell and taste and use
all the senses, so theoretically it’s a more efficient way to facilitate
different parts of the brain working together.”
THE REASONS THESE programs seem to improve mental and cognitive
health is complicated, and by no means is it just about nature and the
senses. Nature appears to act directly upon our autonomic systems,
calming us, but it also works indirectly, through facilitating social
contact and through encouraging exercise and physical movement.
Here’s the emerging European coda on public health from
Finland, Sweden and Scotland: encourage people—especially
distressed populations—to walk, often together, and provide safe,
attractive and naturalistic places for them to do it. The research also
suggests some special places to go: forests and coastlines. Brits go
even more crazy for the coasts than they do for the woods. Basically,
the closer you live to the ocean, the happier you are. Researchers at
the University of Essex School of Health and Human Sciences found