Abstract
This study aims to examine the impacts of community gardening on the daily life of residents and the management organisation of pandemic prevention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, a major public health scourge in 2020. The research team applied a participatory action research approach to work with residents to design and implement the Seeding Plan, a contactless community gardening program. The authors carried out a study to compare the everyday conditions reflecting residents’ mental health of the three subject groups during the pandemic: the participants of the Seeding Plan (Group A), the non-participants living in the same communities that had implemented the Seeding Plan (Group B), and the non-participants in other communities (Group C). According to the results, group A showed the best mental health among the three; Group B, positively influenced by seeding activities, was better than Group C. The interview results also confirmed that the community connections established through gardening activities have a significant impact on maintaining a positive social mentality under extraordinary circumstances. From this, the study concluded that gardening activities can improve people’s mental health, effectively resist negative impacts, and it is a convenient tool with spreading influence on the entire community, so as to support the collective response to public health emergencies in a bottom-up direction by the community.
Highlights
This paper aims to investigate the impacts of community gardening on the daily life of residents and the organisation of community disease prevention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
The research team carried out the Seeding Plan in four phases: first, in the early stages of the pandemic, the research team exchanged views with participants about their daily life and needs, exploring the possible role the Seeding could play within communities; second, given the requirements for disease control, the research team worked with participants to design, organise, and implement the Seeding Plan in a contactless way; third, after adapting the initiative, it had a nationwide rolled out; fourth, the research team evaluated the outcome and solicited feedback, further refined and improved the methodology and the goals
There are three characteristics of community gardening that make it prominent in public health emergencies: (1) community gardening and its easy access as a ubiquitous natural element in daily life match people’s increasing needs and longing for nature as a means to release pressures; (2) gardening as both a group and individual activity effectively adapts to spatial limitations imposed by lockdown and social distancing; (3) the technical issues involved in gardening provides a good medium for communication between neighbourhoods
Summary
Therapeutic landscapes have been widely used as an adjuvant treatment in hospitals, nursing homes, and other professional medical institutions in the developed countries in Europe and America [6]. Most of those projects take the form of healing gardens targeting specific groups, such as people with certain diseases, the elderly, and children [7,8]. Some researchers have proposed that the concept of therapeutic landscape needs to be expanded from hospitals to public areas as well as from special groups to the general population [9]
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