Digging Up an Old Notion of Therapy : Mental health: Doctors were extolling gardening’s healing powers two centuries ago, but only in recent years has horticultural therapy blossomed into a distinct discipline.

Paul Roberson still remembers the flowering fruit tree that grew out back at his family’s Brooklyn apartment house, how it thrived with just a little water and love. And how it slowly died for lack both.

He was a kid then, not yet plagued by the economic and emotional problems that eventually landed him in a series of psychiatric hospitals and halfway houses. For a long time, nature seemed very remote.

But Roberson, 36, has been touched anew by plants and the healing power that horticultural therapists use to reach people in nursing homes and prisons, drug rehabilitation centers, psychiatric hospitals and hospices.

“The world of plants is really just a vehicle for rehabilitation and it’s amazing how strong that vehicle can be,” said Steven H. Davis of the 700-member American Horticultural Therapy Assn. “Plants can awaken people who have not been alive for a long, long time.”

Added Roberson: “Plants make me feel peaceful and that’s something people sometimes can’t do for me, no matter how much they try. It’s like a miracle when you plant a seed and it starts to grow.”

Bodil Drescher Anaya has introduced Roberson and scores of others to that miracle over the last five years at Fountain House, a transitional program in Manhattan for people who are both mentally ill and homeless.

Inside this cluster of buildings on a block of Hell’s Kitchen shadowed by the city’s mid-town skyscrapers, magic is at work. Spilling out of vases everywhere are azaleas, geraniums, gladioli, begonias, roses, snapdragons, tulips and lilies--all grown in a simple downstairs greenhouse.

“A lot of these people are frightened. And people who are frightened are without self-esteem,” said Anaya, 60, a licensed horticultural therapist.

“It’s self-esteem we build up. They come saying ‘I’m not creative, I can’t do that.’ And then all of a sudden they find out they can do it,” Anaya said. “They can make a beautiful flower arrangement or care for a living thing.”

Any Sunday gardener knows the therapeutic value of an afternoon digging in a flower bed.

Licensed horticultural therapists take that notion a step further, using plants to draw out people with emotional and physical disabilities.

“Somehow the presence of a living thing can evoke responses in people who won’t perform or respond to other forms of therapy that use inanimate objects, like poetry, music or art,” said Joel Flagler, who directs a horticultural therapy program at the New York Botanical Garden.

“There have been many documented cases of people in horticultural settings who end up speaking, reaching, lifting--doing things they can’t seem to do in other therapy settings,” said Flagler, who also teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Doctors were extolling gardening’s healing powers two centuries ago, but it has been only in recent years that horticultural therapy has evolved into a distinct discipline taught at about a dozen colleges nationwide.

“(Students) learn about how plants reach people’s senses,” said Davis of the Washington, D.C.-based AHTA. “The scent of a rose, the touch of foliage . . . the look of a flower blooming, the sound of leaves rustling--even the opportunity to harvest for the table and taste that which they grow.”

Miriam’s clinical depression has eased since she joined Fountain House’s horticulture unit. She helps grow beautiful flowers and bundles them in glorious arrangements that are displayed in common rooms throughout the clubhouse.