At the Topsoil Garden we co-create a therapeutic landscape with our garden participants whilst also delivering clinical services in a programmatic way.
Our clinical support staff will include a multi-disciplinary team of people who utilize an eclectic mixture of therapeutic approaches and interventions to assist our garden participants in developing skills that they can then practice in the garden space, learning to grow food alongside a team of trauma-informed and experienced mental health workers. We believe that current clinical approaches to psychosocial disability which focus generally on the individual can only be enhanced by a nurturing garden space, a community of knowledge and ideas and targeted clinical interventions delivered by a team of individuals who are passionate about improving the mental health of our community, social inclusion and connectedness.
Humans are currently faced with many serious challenges. We believe that there is an opportunity now to develop systems of care within our community as we begin to face increasing food shortages, climate change challenges and the plethora of other economic and political scenarios that will undoubtedly present themselves over the coming years.
The Topsoil Garden is a small, but needed, contribution to this exact existential predicament we are facing. Garden spaces have been refuges for humans for a very long time and over the past 100 years in Australia we have seen access to green space for all people decrease, and social isolation increase. The garden itself is a therapeutic arena in disguise. It is an ordinary kind of space, albeit very beautiful, and at the Topsoil Garden, we feel that it is valuable to not be in a space that is associated with terms such as ‘illness’, ‘clinic’ or therapy. Instead, our team will walk alongside you with the cycles and seasons of the garden as a central tenet.
Gardens can teach many things. The seasonal and cyclical nature of growing food will inform our therapeutic approaches. We aim to include a bi-weekly Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) program that teaches skills in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness as one of our core interventions. We believe that our DBT program will greatly complement working in the garden, as gardening is inherently a mindful activity that gently teaches hope, renewal and potential. Gardening is an intrinsically hopeful act. We also aim to utilize principles of numerous other psychological frameworks, including narrative, schema, acceptance and commitment therapy and other evidenced-based modalities for improving mental health. Therapeutic horticulture and nature-based mental health initiatives have only recently begun being studied quantitatively, up until this point the main research approach has been qualitative. There will be opportunities within the garden space for research programs that assess the impact of the interventions provided.
We hope to grow our multidisciplinary team and bring in other skill sets to the garden, including lived experience workforce, mentors, occupational therapy, speech therapy, social work, and physiotherapy and eventually, we aim to integrate a comprehensive health service under the name of Demeter Allied Health that will flourish into a comprehensive health and wellbeing hub. A core principle of our clinical approach is that of receiving feedback from our garden participants and monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of the program. These outcome measurements will assist in ensuring that our interventions are having a positive impact on our participants and ensure ongoing professional and service provision development.
Our clinical approach is also very much holistic. We respect and honour the potential of every garden participant to commence their own healing journey, promoting self-discovery and growth within an environment that accepts all people as they are, whilst gently encouraging the seeds of change that may be possible.
Being in the Topsoil Garden also allows participants to have access to fresh air, organic food, sunlight (and the numerous benefits of vitamin D and regulation of circadian rhythms), and micro-organisms in the soil that impact the human microbiome – all of which have well documented physical and mental health benefits. We aim to promote all forms of health within the garden, one seed at a time.
As the garden grows there are numerous stages and cycles. There is growth and there is death, there is sometimes disease and often pests – but the garden always reminds us that growth and renewal are possible, and that often – things grow in the metaphorical manure of the mind.