Home Farm Alumni News

By Christine Pollard in Duncan, BC.

Hi Everyone On Oct 30th I am on my way again to Santiago Chile to participate in a 2 week HT seminar with Marie Arana of Herbarium. This year is very special because Nancy Lee Colibaba is coming with me and participating also in the seminar! This is a great link between the Royal Botanical Gardens Canada and Herbarium Chile! Having Nancy adds a great deal of value to Marie’s course and highlights the HT in Canada internationally! Nancy, Marie and I will also have students arriving from Argentina and Costa Rica. A truly international affair! After Chile, my husband and I will be traveling onto Peru to tour a couple of ANIA (Association for Children & their Environment) projects. Check out the ANIA website.

Hello Alumni!

We have been putting together a Home Farm Horticultural Therapy Certificate Alumni News now for a couple of years that have included some very inspiring stories of students and life after the certificate.  Meg Hansen started us off on this newsletter enterprise and now Emma Rooney is taking the newsletter another step, into the edu.blogs world!  More networking plus more interaction equals more support!

My time as Education Director with the Canadian Horticultural Therapy Association (CHTA) is now over after 2 years.  Together with the Education Team of Nancy Lee Colibaba, Emma Rooney, Tami Proctor, Don Weber, Alex Scott, Niamh Connery, and Stacey Wilson, we defined the CHTA expectation of a Horticultural Therapist by listing the HT competencies on the CHTA website; updated and put on the CHTA website internship guidelines hopefully encouraging all professionally registered HT’s to take mentor interns; with the legwork of Margaret Nevett, established the first HT group insurance; submitted to the CHTA Board educational guidelines for workshops, certificates, diplomas and degrees which will hopefully be approved this fall for membership guidance.   Emma Rooney has kindly taken over the Education Director position.  I will continue to support Emma and the rest of the Education Team as a member of the CHTA.

The CHTA conference in Calgary was very good!  We had a great assortment of speakers including Gwenn Fried of the Rusk Institute in New York.  I was thrilled that the rest of Canada had an opportunity to attend a CHTA conference and am hoping that hosts across Canada will take the opportunity as the Calgary Zoo did to partner with the CHTA and produce a wonderful conference.  The Calgary Zoo, Jane Reksten,  Gillian Cardwell and Rebecca Feasby worked hard at supporting Karen Ince of the CHTA to make the conference a success.  Thank you!!

The other great news is that Home Farm is going on line in 2009!  With the expense and impact of air travel on the environment and those that do not live close to a centre offering HT education plus the added expense of work leave, travel and accommodation, Home Farm on line will provide  a live on line virtual classroom experience with follow up HT activities and field trips at sites near the students.

Please continue to support this newsletter!  Write your stories however big or small, and continue to inspire future HT’s.  We must continue to support each other as much as we can because the support really does make a difference!!

Thanks,

Christine Pollard, Home Farm

Just in case you missed the last newsletter:

hf_ht_cert_alumni_newsletter_issue-2_2008

By Tami Proctor, HTR in Dundas, Ontario.

“Nature at its Best” – My Garden 2008

My journey into Horticultural Therapy began with a magazine I received for Christmas in 2001.  In this magazine, an article about Horticultural Therapy quite literally changed my life! Prior to this magazine, I had never heard of Horticultural Therapy and had no clue what it was.   In the moment of reading that article, I felt as though I had been struck by lightening!  With a certainty so clear, I knew that I had to do this professionally for the rest of my career.  But how…? I had no clue where to begin.

I forged my way ahead regardless of knowing what I was doing and learned along the way. I connected with the right organizations, took every course I could take and read everything I could get my hands on!  I think eight years later I am still forging my way ahead and creating the career I feel most reflects the way I wish to practice Horticultural Therapy.

When I first began my practice, I started with volunteering in Horticultural Therapy and introducing horticulture programming into my practice as a Recreation Therapist.  I was offered an opportunity to practice Horticulture Therapy one day per week but how would I do that if I were working as a Recreation Therapist?  I had to decide if I should take the leap.  I needed to believe in my skill and myself and jump!  I leapt and I have never looked back!  The net appeared and the opportunities have been remarkable!  I am now currently self-employed, contracting out my services as a Horticultural Therapist.  I have three contracts and work four days per week, and have begun teaching Horticultural Therapy to others.  Did I ever think that I would get to this point, certainly not when I first began my journey into HT.  If I had to think about all of the points that I needed to gain in order to receive my designation as a registered horticultural therapist, I do not think that I would have been able to move forward.   I would have been crippled by the amount of work that I needed to achieve.  So instead, I kept my focus on the smaller picture, I kept chipping away, learning more, getting more work.

I did eventually get to my destination of receiving my designation as an HTR but 6 years after I had read that article!  In my case, it was both the journey and the destination that were equally important. My message to those in the process of obtaining their designation, don’t give up!  Keep plugging away, and take the leap!  Your belief in yourself and your skill is the key to others believing you to be a quality Horticultural Therapist.  The journey is just as important as the destination enjoy your journey!

HT and Neurorehabilitation: Working with people with TBI

By Lynn Larkin in Peterborough, Ontario.

My background is more in horticulture than human services….18 years in the horticulture industry and 4 in human services.  For 2 years now I have been working as a rehabilitation assistant (RA) in the community with people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).  The treatment plans are set up with client by the therapists of the interdisciplinary team.  I assist client and report back to the team.  The horticultural therapy (HT) courses, the experiences shared by Christine Pollard and classmates and courses that I have attended through the Ontario Brain Injury Association (OBIA) have been of great benefit to me.  Aside from learning new knowledge,  these courses always remind me when working with people with disabilities whether cognitive or physical about the need to always be mindful, present, client centred and professional.

In the community setting the RA is the person who spends the most time with the client with regard to the interdisciplinary team.  The RA becomes part of the client’s life and this is why it is so important to maintain professionalism and client-centredness….the friendly professional I suppose.  It is my job to support the client toward meeting their goals whether it be to live independently, re-enter community or return to work/school.  The ‘real life’ context in which I work can be challenging, requires big shoulders and great patience because I have to be able to deal with the behaviours that accompany TBI which usually take form in angry outbursts or inappropriate comments.

• Brain first approach….If something is going wrong think in terms of the injured brain first.

• Where is the brain injured?  Dr. Sherrie  Bieman Copeland & Dr. Dawn Good

Judith Falconer PhD writes “Head injured individuals require tight structure in their daily lives to survive, grow and improve. Most of us lead highly structured lives….which allows us to put  our lives on automatic pilot. Far too often, head injured individuals have no structure in their daily lives and therefore accomplish very little each day.  Tight structure increases the capabilities of the injured individual and reduces the need to continually make decisions”.  I work with a client who sustained a TBI to frontal lobe.  He said that time means nothing to him.  He puts things off that he wouldn’t have pre-injury, he is unable to multitask, easily distractable, has trouble paying attention to things, gets frustrated very easily, has a poor memory.  He is not the person he used to be. I see him 3x/wk for 3-4 hours each time. His goal is to live safely and independently and he is working on that by developing  routines around instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) such as cooking, banking/paying bills, grocery shopping.  Roger Wood, Professor of clinical neuropsychology writes that continuum of care needs to be ’slow stream’  because of the persisting cognitive deficits that impose important constraints on learning and rehabilitation.

More excerpts from my notes on Neurobehavioural disability by Roger Wood….

Often people with TBI lose their social role.  Many are not able to live independently in the community, maintain employment, maintain relationships….goal is to prevent disability from becoming a social handicap. He talks about structured rehab, assisting person with TBI to ‘live life’.  Rehabilitation is   long-term, not intensive, interdisciplinary, community based and  psycho-social, goals have to be meaningful to the client. The rehab team helps the person with TBI accept the disability without  losing  identity.

• A good read…‘Participate to Learn’:  A promising practice for community ABI rehabilitation, Brain Injury, October 2006: 20(11): 1111-1117.  Study done in Ontario

• Participate to learn vs. Learn to participate

• Learning is result of experience in real life activities

• 3 important characteristics…living, loving, doing

I work with an OT who promotes my experience in horticulture to clients who have an interest in gardening and I have had the opportunity to use HT in some treatment plans.  The activities varied from sowing seeds, garden planning, walking through the local ecology garden, making plant labels.  She will also encourage my clients to attend the farmers market with me for the social outing.  I have used HT to simply build rapport with a client who was considered ‘difficult’ by the team.  She became more flexible as she was able to make some decisions about her treatment, gained some confidence by just getting out to the garden and is now willing to work at her original goals.

My long term goal (dream) is to develop a community garden with programs for people living with TBI and  mental illness.  A community garden program would help to meet the physical, cognitive, emotional, social needs of the population I work with. To be able to provide a welcoming/safe environment for them to be socially included and a vocational outlet  for clients to learn skills needed to ‘live life’ by helping them to generalize what they learn to home, work and meaningful activities.  I cannot say when this will happen because there will be so much to do to get this off the ground.  Assignment #4 is in the works!!

Thanks for reading…please email any comments/questions to larkin [at] nexicom [dot] net

By Ruth Dutchak in Calgary, Alberta.

It seems remarkable that I ran a Horticultural Therapy (HT) program in a subsidized housing complex this summer.  After all, I had only learned of Horticultural Therapy back in January, 2007.

Learning about Horticultural Therapy came at an important time in my life.  After 30 plus years as a Nuclear Medicine Technologist, I was contemplating retirement.  I knew however, that I needed a purpose and something constructive in my life to do in the ensuing years.  Gardening alone would not be enough!  So when a Centre Street Church (CSC) friend and fellow gardener showed me articles about Horticultural Therapy, I was smitten.  This approach would allow me to serve both God and community.

Before I knew it, Christine Pollard’s Home Farm Horticultural Therapy Certificate became available at the Calgary Zoo & Botanical Gardens.  Everything fell into place, including the funds for the program and time off work.

I contacted Centre Street Church Urban Ministries which held a townhouse in a subsidized housing complex for community programming.  Here they offered sewing lessons and ESL to immigrant women, organized game nights, crafts and bible studies for children.  Despite the little I knew, they enthusiastically accepted my proposal to conduct a Horticultural Therapy program for the following summer.

Then it was off to class!  Christine’s classes were intense and I struggled with the assignments as it had been some time since I had to complete homework.  The participants in the class, however, were great and a whole new world opened up for me.

At the beginning of May I started meeting with the children who attended craft night.  Since the ‘craft gals’ were intending to finish their program the middle of May, I naively thought the children would simply follow into the gardening program.  Never try to second guess children! Only three children came and then I had the task of finding other participants.  Gradually more children came and at the end I had about 13 taking part. Their ages ranged from 5-12 years.  They were from a diverse ethnic backgrounds, including Afghanistan, Canada, Colombia, Jamaica and Turkey.  My goal for the summer was to provide the children with some basic horticultural knowledge, fun and an opportunity to create community within their diverse differences.

At times, it seemed chaotic and fast paced.  The children came with great expectations and were often waiting on the front lawn when I arrived (even 30 minutes before starting time).  They would run and greet me, wanting to help carry supplies, questioning me on the planned activity and one eight year old boy never failed to ask what treat I had brought along.  The treats varied from ice cream to cookies, vegetables and ‘dirt’ cake, just to name a few.  We also picked vegetables and made a salad from containers that had been planted earlier.

As with anything we do, there are mistakes made along the way.  And of course, things that went well too.  To say it was a great learning experience would be an understatement.

What didn’t go well?
1. Volunteers
I did not put enough emphasis on volunteers and did not spend enough time recruiting.  Since the program started slowly I thought one volunteer would be enough but this did not allow me to give the children the attention they needed.

2. Planning
For my own sanity, I realized early on that I needed to be even more organized and think further ahead.  With better planning, I would not have felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants. Each week was busy preparing for the next activity and getting the necessary supplies organized.

What went well?
1. A good relationship developed between the children and me.  This was made possible by the children’s enthusiasm which was met by my caring and positive manner.

2. Working alone, it was not possible to help each child individually with their activity but this allowed an opportunity for the older children to step in and support the younger ones.

3. Many of the moms stopped by to observe and they would share their own gardening experiences. I enjoyed getting to know them.  My heart was warmed to see the love they had for their children.

4. Most of the activities were successful and the children had great pride in what they accomplished.  I was well prepared each week and had a good variety of activities to offer.

5. When I did assessments, I could see changes more clearly and actually had something positive to report.

This experience was invaluable to my training as a Horticultural Therapy Technician.  I hope to continue this program next year.  In the meantime, I have realized I need more horticultural knowledge and have already enrolled in the Zoo’s horticulture courses.

We closed this season’s program with a party and I was satisfied that the goals had been met.