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Cura’s healing garden concept: From the Carthusian ordering and sacred garden tradition to a garden as a common and a resourcing ground



A recovery journey in twelve steps


The walk is built on four bodies of evidence, read one over the next: 

  • Mental recovery, through connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment (the CHIME framework, Leamy et al.);
  • Occupation, as doing, being, becoming and belonging (Wilcock); 
  • Supportive space, offering control, movement, social support and positive distraction (Ulrich); 
  • Restorative nature, through being away, fascination, extent and compatibility (Kaplan, Attention Restoration Theory). 
Each garden space carries one stage. Linked, they stage a single recovery at the scale of a life, and retrace the site’s own arc: being held by care, reclaiming oneself, taking care up again.

Nine engraved stones mark the key steps, in Latin, Italian and translated voices, from the Carthusian order to Basaglia. 




The inward steps

the Secret gardens

The walk begins outside the garden, in the fragile state of a person in need of reconstruction, and truly starts at the threshold of the central axis. The first steps turn toward the self, held in the Secret gardens: enclosed, intimate chambers in which to withdraw, gather one’s thoughts, and confront and grieve the past.


Standing in the open

The Rondò and the Prato

At the middle of the axis, Dignity reclaims the present self (worth, history and uniqueness) once denied by the asylum, at a Rondò around a newly planted lime, where the person stands among peers, in the open. The walk then opens north into the Prato, where Recognition, Hope and Hindsight carry the strength to stand among others, be moved by the surroundings, and look back on the path. Hindsight rests at the Fermata, where a chestnut (Castanea sativa) closes the eastern end of the axis.


Agency and return Tending the Garden

Last comes Agency, the moment the one who was cared for begins to care in turn: a direct invitation to take authorship and responsibility through gardening, in the pavilion chamber south of the Fermata. The journey ends when the visitor steps outside the garden, carrying care back into the world, to continue, or to begin anew, on their own. Care given back: the myth completed in a single life.





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