Trellis which is Scotland’s network for therapeutic gardening, supports over 500 groups across the country who use therapeutic gardening (also known as ‘Social and Therapeutic Gardening’) to help people enhance their health and wellbeing.
We help projects to get started, or at any point in their development, helping to ensure a high quality of service provision, in a variety of settings across the country. We also provide a searchable directory and map of projects.
There is a large and growing evidence base on how the use of gardening and garden spaces can promote physical and mental health, recovery and rehabilitation, boost cognitive and neurological function, and promote social connections. Gardening also offers education and training opportunities – not only in horticulture – but life skills, literacy and numeracy, retail, mindfulness and environmental conservation skills. In turn these can lead to improvements in a person’s confidence, pride, quality of life and self-esteem.
We manage a national database and directory of the groups and practitioners who provide therapeutic services – have a look at our map to find projects near you. We also run year-round training to help professionals and volunteers to develop skills in therapeutic gardening.
We operate an information service to answer queries as well as a fieldworker team who can provide on-site support. If any Community Link Workers are interested in finding out more about Trellis’s projects, please do get in touch with us, by phone on 01738 624348 or email info@trellisscotland.org.uk
Fiona Thackeray is Head of Operations and Development at Trellis, Scotland’s Network for Therapeutic Gardening.
