Dr Clare Hickman

Therapeutic Landscapes: A History of English Hospital Gardens since 1800 was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. The aim of Therapeutic Landscapes is to bring together historical and contemporary debates on the use of the garden as a therapeutic space for the first time. I narrate the story of the landscapes associated with psychiatric, general and specialist medical institutions and ask what did they look like, how were they used and how did this relate to medical concepts?

The book traces the history of these gardens from the grottos, Chinese galleries and summer houses of elite nineteenth-century lunatic asylums, through Florence Nightingale’s championing of the Victorian pavilion hospital design with its courtyard gardens, and the open-air institutions of the Edwardian period with their revolving chalets. It concludes with a discussion of new hospital gardens being created by designers such as Dan Pearson in the twenty-first century.

Other writing on hospital gardens

• January 2025: I wrote an article outlining the history of hospital gardens for a special issue of Landscape (the journal of the Landscape Institute) on the theme of ‘The healing power of landscape: Nature, community and resilience in healthcare environments’. You can read it here from page 8 https://issuu.com/landscape-institute/docs/13470_li_journal_3_2024_v6_issuu
• October 2024: ‘”Sick Hands, Thin and White, Were Always Slipping Offerings across My Windowsill, Offerings for the Little Birdlings”: Multispecies Encounters within and around Modern Rural British Sanatoria’ in a special issue of Modernist Cultures on the theme of ‘Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures’ https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2024.04
• Spring 2018: ‘Care in the Countryside: the theory and practice of therapeutic landscapes in the early twentieth century’, in Landscape and Green Spaces: Gardens and Garden History in the West Midlands eds Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell (Hertfordshire University Press, May 2018)
• December 2014: ‘Cheerfulness and tranquility: gardens in the Victorian asylum’ in Lancet Psychiatry Vol 1, No.7
• 2009: ‘Cheerful Prospects and Tranquil Restoration: The Visual Experience of Landscape as part of the Therapeutic Regime of the British Asylum, 1800-1860’, in History of Psychiatry, 20 (4): 425-441
• 2005: ‘The ‘Picturesque’ at Brislington House, Bristol: The Role of Landscape in Relation to the Treatment of Mental Illness in the Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum’ in Garden History, 33:1 (Summer 2005), 47-60