By:
Cindy Spence

Source(s):
Jennifer Bradley jbradley@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu, (352) 392-7936
Tammy Kohlleppel (352) 392-7641

GAINESVILLE—Take a walk and call me in the morning may be a good prescription for stress, according to researchers at the University of Florida.

In a relatively new area of horticultural research, Professor Jennifer Bradley and graduate researcher Tammy Kohlleppel found that walks in botanic gardens lower visitors’ perceptions of their stress levels.

“The research on this is very limited, and the field is wide open,” Bradley said. “We don’t really know what happens with a botanic garden. We know that there is something about being in nature, being in the outdoors that has a positive effect on people, but we have not quantified that so we wanted to look into it.”

Bradley and Kohlleppel used questionnaires this spring to survey visitors to three Florida gardens: Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami and Mounts Botanical Garden in West Palm Beach.

The 312 questionnaires filled out and returned indicated a statistically significant drop in visitors’ perceptions of their stress levels, Bradley said.

“The implications for health and well-being are obvious,” Bradley said. “And for public gardens and the horticulture industry, the implications are good, too. Funding for public gardens is getting harder and harder to come by, so this kind of information gives botanic gardens and arboreta a way to market themselves and more ammunition in seeking funding.”

Bradley said botanic gardens and arboreta were being built at the rate of two or three a year at the turn of the century. In the last decade, eight to 12 new gardens have opened each year.

“That’s very impressive, and something is leading that force,” Bradley said. “Perhaps with urbanization society is demanding more and more of these places . . . definitely they are cultural institutions where you can go and commune with nature. What we want to know is why they are gaining in popularity and why so many visitors are going to them.”

While she thought botanic gardens might have stress-busting qualities, Kohlleppel said it was good to find out empirically that they do.

Kohlleppel said botanic gardens had a greater beneficial effect for visitors who had a lower perception of their well-being. Upon departing, these visitors reported a much-improved outlook.

“To me, this shows that botanic gardens are particularly helpful for people who need a coping strategy,” Kohlleppel said. “People who needed a coping mechanism got more out of their visits.

“Now we need to determine what it was that affected them more: Was it just that it’s not home, where the kids are screaming, or work, with deadlines and bosses,” Kohlleppel said. “We’d like to find out.”

The survey demographics showed that the majority of the visitors were women and the average age of visitors was 52. Most were Florida residents with incomes more than $50,000 a year and had completed some college.

Bradley said that as society has moved indoors, overall interest in gardening has increased. About 70 million households perform gardening, and that’s increasing, she said.

“As a society, we have less and less exposure to agriculture, nature and the outdoors. As we move into apartments and cities and commute to work every day, we have limited access to the outdoors. So we see gardens filling a niche by providing a place where people can go to be around trees, be outdoors, be around nature,” Bradley said.

“For some reason, society is demanding more and more of these places we can go,” Bradley said. “The more we’ve moved indoors, the more we crave the outdoors.”

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