Growing happy
Connecting hands to soil can help the brain — and the heart
March 9, 2025 | story and photos by Marta Zherukha
Tucked behind a sprawling network of hospitals and medical facilities, the Wilmot Botanical Gardens greenhouse shelters row after row of plants: succulents, Pothos, trees and ferns, sticking out of green pots overflowing with warm, dark dirt. Inside the greenhouse, a much drier and cooler environment than expected, evaporative coolers keep the temperature and humidity comfortable for the plants — and for the humans who tend to them.
“OK. Raise your hand if you want to be happy,” Julie Abrams-Bernier, a psychologist, asks the room.
Eleven hands rise, belonging to students dealing with stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health struggles. They sit in a circle of mismatched chairs in the Wilmot office, shifting nervously in their seats.
The group meets weekly for a wellness discussion and plant-based activities as part of the University of Florida’s therapeutic horticulture program led by a psychologist, a horticultural therapist and a couple of volunteers. The program gives students methods to improve their mental health and wellness while also teaching them how to nurture, propagate and craft with plants. The combination of therapy strategies and work with nature has been shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression that are common among college students.
UF’s therapeutic horticulture program is one of the largest in the country. Others are found in Portland, New York City and cities much larger and populated than Gainesville, but this city has a special advantage.
Charles Guy, a professor emeritus at UF who leads graduate students in research on therapeutic horticulture, said the program benefits from being part of such a comprehensive university with a medical school, agricultural college, large health sciences department and UF Health all housed on campus. Wilmot Botanical Gardens is physically convenient to all of it.
“There’s almost no place like it in the whole United States,” Guy said.
In the office, half the students sit with both feet planted on the floor. They readily answer questions about what it means to be happy, offering advice they hope sounds like it’s for their peers; the whispered question marks at the ends of their sentences imply it’s for them, too.
The other students sit quietly with their legs crossed, some twisting their arms over their chests and some scribbling in their notebooks as they listen to Abrams-Bernier, who works at the UF Counseling and Wellness Center.
Today, she teaches students about core values, or personal beliefs that guide a person’s actions. She opens discussion about why defining priorities and boundaries is important to lead a balanced life, and after some prompting, the students do most of the talking. A ceiling fan with leaf-shaped blades rotates above the circle of chairs, rustling paper handouts where they are circling their 10 most important values from a list of 145.
The group connects their core values to important aspects of their lives, including friends (“community”), partners (“love”), roommates (“patience”), classes (“knowledge”), religion (“faith”), overcommitment (“achievement”) and conflict (“honesty”). They also share real problems, like moving away from family for the first time (“growth”), people who take up the whole aisle in the grocery store (“self-awareness”) and that one uncle who stirs up drama every Thanksgiving (“forgiveness”). This wellness strategy includes elements from a form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness to work through conflict.
“Each one of these kinds of therapeutic orientations has something to offer in terms of wellness, resilience [and] grounding,” Abrams-Bernier said. She hopes to provide students a “toolbox” of strategies to pull from when they encounter stress.
Two heavy glass doors connect the office to the greenhouse. The air is marked by its usual scent of fresh soil and hose water on a hot summer day, but today, it also rings with the chatter of 20-something-year-olds getting to know one another. A sign on the far end of the greenhouse hints at their efforts — “Therapeutic Horticulture: Helping people live a better life.”
The volume of conversation in the greenhouse swells and shrinks based on how intently the students are focused on their biodomes, self-contained ecological systems they use to propagate plants.
Each participant receives an open-and-close mini-greenhouse containing Styrofoam, which floats like an iceberg atop water, covering the bottom of the enclosure. The Styrofoam has 60 holes, filled with soil plugs. The students start their weekly sessions cutting leaves off plants around the greenhouse and sticking them in empty plugs in their biodomes, hoping they’ll root.
As the weeks pass, they re-pot the successful cuttings into soil and take them home.
The students all wear dark-colored clothing to avoid dirt stains, save for Harry Bishop, who dons a yellow T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. As he opens his biodome and surveys the Pothos plants he propagated just a week ago, he leans away from the fold-out tables to keep the soil, roots and muddy water as far from him as possible. Pothos grow quickly and are known for their long, trailing tendrils that sprawl and climb over nearby surfaces; they are forgiving plants, generally pest- and disease-free and thriving in almost any condition.
“I hate dirt,” Bishop said. “I hate it under my fingernails. But I put my hands in the planter, and I take my babies home.” Today, he takes home six.
Bishop is a biochemistry sophomore whose heavy course load makes it difficult to motivate himself to participate in the program. But his time at the greenhouse grounds him, he said, allowing him to discuss and reflect on his habits throughout the week.
He shares his biodome with another student, Hannah Duckwitz, a chemical engineering sophomore who enjoys casually chatting with other students going through similar experiences to her.
“I’m dealing with a lot right now, but this is helping me learn strategies: journaling, mindfulness,” she said. “I wouldn’t do it on my own.”
Of all the components of the therapeutic horticulture program, she participates most when interacting with the plants. She takes pictures of her plants, running her fingers along the leaves of the clippings.
“It fulfills kind of a pet role,” she said. “It raises my mood.”
The therapeutic horticulture program serves more than student groups, with a program for Parkinson’s patients and their care partners, one for life transition skills, one for an addiction treatment facility in Gainesville and one for therapeutic horticulture alumni, consisting of participants from earlier programs that were cut short because of a lack of funding.
The program currently benefits from a university grant worth nearly half a million. Leah Diehl, director of the therapeutic horticulture program, said she spends a lot of time applying for other grants to keep the program afloat.
Diehl also researches methods of therapeutic horticulture in different age groups, genders and occupations. Her published research focuses on the practice of therapeutic horticulture and the benefits of gardening for people with mental health concerns. Her dream is to package the research, curricula and protocols she’s honed over the years, she said, so other universities can implement similar programs.
In addition to running programs and doing research, Diehl put together a certificate track for UF students to take 12 credits of therapeutic horticulture coursework. She teaches all the classes in the certificate, and in them she shows students treatment techniques, connects them to internships and leads them to conduct research in the field.
“A lot of that work that we do informs then the content, the courses and the things that I’m teaching students,” Diehl said.
The challenge, she said, is that people often misunderstand what the discipline of therapeutic horticulture actually is.
“There’s probably a lot of programs that are doing therapeutic horticulture that aren’t calling it that,” she said, “and I think there’s also probably a lot of programs that are calling it therapeutic horticulture that aren’t doing it.”
Participating in the program usually sparks an interest in the field that keeps people coming back. Alexa Heilman said she was part of Diehl’s first certificate cohort in 2018 and the first person in her cohort to be certified through the American Horticultural Therapy Association.
“Plants are almost like my religion,” said Heilman, now a registered horticultural therapist at the Gainesville plant nursery GROW HUB.
She started the program when she was in a difficult period of transition, and she graduated during the pandemic. Both experiences guided how she thinks about the mental health crisis facing college students today, she said. Heilman said she’s worried about the impact deteriorating mental health on college campuses will have on students if they don’t take action to learn how they can help themselves.
“The best remedy,” Heilman said, “is to exert control on your immediate environment.”
Though people can’t control how plants live or die, they can have a strong hand in their care and growth. A big part of the therapeutic horticulture program is seeing what will and won’t help plants grow. Living with the cycles of nature has some poetic merit to it, Heilman said.
Inside the greenhouse, slivers of sunlight shine through the glass walls, dancing over the tables and forcing some of the students to squint as they clip plants to make tea, today’s wellness activity.
One of the ingredients for the tea is “Cuban oregano,” also known as “Mexican mint.” Light green and fuzzy, Coleus amboinicus isn’t oregano, or even mint. Its strong fragrance, reminiscent of both, wafts throughout the greenhouse as the students, wielding scissors rusted by water, find the most ideal leaves for their brew.
After they gather, they cover the bottom of a cup with the pungent plant, along with lemongrass, lime and honey, and bring it to a volunteer to add hot water. The students sit back and enjoy their tea, savoring the taste of what they labored to make. The purpose and confidence that comes from cultivating a garden flows throughout the greenhouse, even if students never verbalize that these two benefits are the main goals of the therapeutic horticulture program.
Behind the tea-making table, a 6-foot Bodhi tree dubbed Ficus religiosa sits in a dark-colored pot. Bodhi trees, which have heart-shaped leaves and can grow to 100 feet tall, are a central symbol in Buddhism. According to tradition, the Buddha was meditating under a Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India, when he attained enlightenment, finally understanding how to be free from suffering.
For Buddhists, the tree is a symbol of humans’ ability to achieve the same.
Hanging from the skinny branches of Wilmot’s Bodhi tree are green heart-shaped pieces of paper, on which students from a prior semester wrote what they were grateful for.
One has a smiley face drawn on it. It reads, “Being here.”
