A Tell the Bees Research Summary
Gardening in Addiction Recovery
What one residential recovery program can teach us about tending, participation, stress, and shared purpose.
Recovery happens through many kinds of work. Some of it happens in conversation. Some happens in meetings, treatment, relationships, routines, and repeated choices. A 2023 University of San Francisco project asked whether gardening could offer one more constructive activity alongside that work. Its findings do not prove that gardening treats addiction. They do offer a useful picture of what a well-planned garden program can contribute to everyday life in a residential recovery setting.
The Project
A Garden Added to Residential Treatment
In 2023, Sophia Agne completed a University of San Francisco Master of Science in Nursing project examining therapeutic gardening as a complementary resource within addiction treatment.
The project took place at a 32-bed residential substance-use treatment facility for adult men with histories of involvement in the criminal justice system. The facility already used an Integrated Dual Disorder Treatment approach. The garden was added as an outdoor activity and potential coping resource alongside existing care.
- Setting: 32-bed residential substance-use treatment facility
- Population: Adult men with previous criminal-justice involvement
- Duration: Four weeks of quantitative survey measurement
- Approach: Mixed quantitative and qualitative evaluation
- Activities: Creating beds, planting, watering, weeding, pruning, harvesting, and learning basic plant care
- Additional focus: Nutrition education and developing a plan for maintaining the garden after the project
What Participants Reported
The Results Were Encouraging—Within This Program
The most useful way to read the findings is as evidence from one real-world residential program, not as proof that every garden will produce the same effects.
01
Less Reported Stress
Participants commonly described the garden as calming and reported reduced stress associated with gardening or spending time outdoors.
In the project’s final survey, 69.2% strongly agreed that they felt less stressed after being in the garden or spending time outside.
02
Well-Being
Participants also reported improvements in their sense of overall well-being during the project, and many said they could imagine using gardening as a recovery resource in the future.
In the final survey, 69.2% strongly agreed that their overall well-being had improved during the garden project.
03
Shared Purpose
The project was not solely an individual activity. Planting and caring for the garden also created something participants could work on together.
In the exit survey, 76.9% strongly agreed that they felt part of a team working toward a greater goal.
One of the Most Useful Lessons
The garden does not ask for a confession. It asks for presence.
Recovery settings necessarily involve conversation, reflection, and difficult personal work. A garden offers a different kind of participation.
A person can water. Pull a weed. Carry soil. Check a tomato. Sit on a bench. Notice what opened overnight. Work beside someone without needing to explain very much.
Agne’s project included participant comments suggesting that this kind of positive action could matter when talking alone did not feel useful. That does not make gardening therapy in itself. It does suggest that recovery environments benefit from offering more than one way to participate.
Why Tending May Be Useful
The Value Is Often in the Ordinary Work
The study points toward several qualities of gardening that are practical rather than mysterious.
Something to Do
Gardening offers concrete activity. Watering, planting, harvesting, or tidying a bed gives the hands and attention a defined task.
Something to Care For
A plant responds to repeated care. The relationship is modest but real: water matters, timing matters, and returning matters.
Something Shared
A garden can create low-pressure collaboration. Two people can work beside one another without the activity depending on conversation.
Something That Changes
Growth becomes visible over days and weeks. The garden provides evidence that change is often gradual rather than immediate.
Patience and Visible Change
A garden makes progress visible without pretending that growth is instant.
Several participants in the project connected gardening with patience. That comparison has an obvious resonance with recovery, but it should remain a metaphor rather than a clinical claim.
A seed does not become a plant because someone wants it to happen faster. A garden develops through small acts repeated over time. That can be noticed without asking the landscape to teach a particular lesson.
Reading the Evidence Carefully
What This Project Does—and Does Not—Show
Agne’s work is valuable because it documents a garden program in an actual residential substance-use treatment setting. Its limits are equally important.
- It was a single-site master’s project rather than a large controlled clinical trial.
- The findings primarily describe participant reports and observations within that particular program.
- The project does not establish that gardening treats substance use disorder or improves sobriety outcomes.
- Reported reductions in stress and improvements in well-being should not be interpreted as proof of a specific therapeutic mechanism.
- The results do support further interest in gardening as a complementary activity within recovery environments.
From Research to Landscape Design
Not Every Useful Recovery Garden Needs a Gardening Program
The USF project centered on active horticulture: raised beds, food growing, plant care, and shared tasks. That is one valuable model.
Tell the Bees often works differently. A recovery garden can also support people who do not want to garden at all. Someone may sit outside between groups. Walk a short path. Notice bees in mountain mint. Talk with another resident. Spend ten quiet minutes away from the building.
That distinction matters. We are interested not only in therapeutic gardening programs, but in creating landscapes that remain useful throughout the day whether or not a formal activity is taking place.
The garden is not the treatment. It is part of the environment in which recovery is happening.
For Recovery Centers
What the Project Suggests for Design
The most transferable lessons are practical.
- Give people a reason to go outdoors besides scheduled recreation.
- Provide both active and passive ways to use the garden.
- Include comfortable seating near, not only inside, activity areas.
- Make participation possible at different physical ability levels.
- Keep routes, edges, and sightlines understandable.
- Choose plants and garden systems the facility can realistically maintain.
- If food-growing beds are included, establish who waters, harvests, resets, and manages them through client turnover.
- Design for continuity rather than depending on one enthusiastic staff member.
- Include ecological life and seasonal change even when residents are not actively tending plants.
- Keep garden use complementary to—not a replacement for—clinical care and established recovery supports.
People and Pollinators
The Garden Can Support More Than One Kind of Life
Agne’s project was built primarily around therapeutic gardening, edible plants, nutrition, and participation.
Tell the Bees adds another layer: native and pollinator-supporting planting. A recovery landscape can provide human use while also supplying nectar, pollen, shelter, seed, stems, and seasonal habitat.
That ecological activity is not included because pollinators are a treatment tool. It matters because the garden itself should be alive and useful—and because noticing another living thing can be one of the ordinary pleasures of being outside.
Primary Source
The Use of Therapeutic Gardening in Addiction Recovery
Sophia Agne, MSN, University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions, 2023.
The project used a mixed-method approach in a 32-bed residential substance-use treatment facility, combining four weeks of Likert-scale surveys with ethnographic observation, exit interviews, and written responses. The author concluded that therapeutic gardening showed promise as an additional resource within addiction recovery while describing it as complementary to existing treatment.
A garden can stand beside the work of recovery.
Tell the Bees designs native, pollinator-supporting landscapes for recovery and behavioral-health settings—places for everyday outdoor use, tending, sitting, conversation, reflection, and contact with the living world.