Restore: How Green Spaces support Human Restoration
By Gabrielle Stannus
Sandra Schwarz is a Melbourne-based Landscape Architect with a passion for restorative and therapeutic landscapes. Her book Restore demonstrates how green spaces support human restoration, whilst being underpinned by the guiding question, ‘HOW can you do that in practice?’
Schwarz firstly dives into the history of green spaces, examining how people used gardens as places of respite in the past. She then explores the theoretical frameworks that help us better understand our relationship with gardens and nature today. These theories range from Ulrich’s Supportive Gardens Theory to Kellert’s take on Biophilic Design.
The second part of Restore focuses on considerations for design. Schwarz translates research into practice, providing practical and tangible guidance for those seeking to design restorative spaces, as she answers the question: ‘What makes a green space restorative’? She then presents restorative spaces by their universal qualities and traits (i.e. design considerations), namely ‘choice’, ‘verdant’, ‘spatiality’, ‘comfort’, ‘movement’ and ‘sensual’, rather than by typology, e.g. dementia-friendly garden. A chapter on each design consideration follows, including case studies from Australia and abroad, as well as several plant lists.
If you work in any type of green space/green design, healthcare design, healing space design, landscape architecture, therapeutic horticulture and horticultural therapy, this book should be on your shelves. You will not get cookie cutter designs that you can lift from these pages into your plans; rather, inspiration aplenty from other designers and a Design Considerations Matrix to help prompt you as you explore specific user needs.
Horticulturists, especially plant selectors, seeking to better understand the growing demand for plants to be used in restorative green spaces would also do well to read this book. Rather than simply copying the plant lists that grace these pages into your plant stock lists, I would encourage you to consider how the plants you currently grow may possess some of the qualities outlined in the Design Considerations Matrix Tool that Schwarz provides at the end of this book. You may be able to market those plants differently to better appeal to designers seeking restorative horticulture outcomes, by understanding what they are trying to achieve.
Restore: How Green Spaces support Human Restoration by Sandra Schwarz
Release date: 10 March 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7635742-0-5
Publisher: humannaturescapes (358 pages)