Plans for Turning Point Behavioral Care Center’s therapeutic garden grew from a seed that was never supposed to yield results quite this large.
What began as an idea for a 1,200 square foot garden became 10 times that size. The design, unveiled Friday morning in the rear of the Skokie building, reflects a garden that will measure 12,000 square feet.
“It creates the kind of experience that we want the whole community to have with Turning Point, which is that this is a welcoming place, a place where the goal is for everyone to feel better,” said Turning Point Outpatient Therapist Adam Levin.
Established in 1969, Turning Point is an outpatient mental health care center providing comprehensive mental health services to all regardless of financial resources or intensity of need.
Levin oversees Turning Point’s Garden Club, which ranges from eight to 15 clients. For the last several years, they have tended to a garden of more than 1,000 square feet in the corner of the lot. The original idea was to expand that garden before plans for a separate and much larger multi-purpose garden along the base of the building took hold.
Turning Point’s recent purchase of the southern half of its building allowed for the larger garden option, said Turning Point Financial Officer Marsha Hahn. “It will include space for groups, quiet space for individuals, for walking around, for planting and for picking edibles.”
What also ignited the project was a $51,700 grant from the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Foundation. The project is a collaboration between Turning Point and the Chicago Botanic Garden Horticultural Therapy Program.
Chicago Botanic Garden Horticulture Therapy Department Design Consultant Clare Johnson had already begun working on designing a smaller garden when she had to start from scratch.
She didn’t mind.
“What was kind of fun about designing the natural layout of this large new space was working with a spectrum from public space with a lot of activity happening to private space on the southern end,” she said.
In other words, some of the garden includes space where clients can be alone or have one-on-one sessions with therapists. Other space allows for more community-minded activities.
The garden will be spacious and comfortable and include plants and edibles. It also will feature a fire-pit and community plots where clients can have their own small spaces for plants and food.
Johnson said the project is unique — especially with a garden this large — but green space for health facilities is making a comeback.
A thousand or so years ago, she said, monasteries and other facilities used to include garden space for therapeutic and anti-stress reasons. In the 1990s, such spaces were wiped out in the name of efficiency and sterilization, she said, but she’s seeing a return.
Levin said he witnesses first-hand the therapeutic value for clients who become impassioned gardeners.
“The therapy garden is a place where the clients can feel empowered to nurture something while watching it grow,” he said. “When a client plants a sunflower seed and sees a 10-foot sunflower grow, he or she feels excited.”
Levin said the entire Turning Point community will benefit from the garden because its creation will make the back of the building a new front entrance. Work will begin next spring and will continue on for two seasons — as funding becomes available.
Garden Club clients who thought they were getting an expanded garden were amazed when they learned news of the larger garden.
Or as Larry Rotheiser of Park Ridge said, “the news just blew me away.”
Scott Burns of Skokie said he has grown close to the group and has learned to be a better gardener and how to cook at home in more healthful ways.
That all happened because of a small garden in the corner lot, which will look even smaller once the new one is planted. But the clients have no plans to abandon it.
“We’ll still use this one,” Rotheiser said. “This was our first. It’s where everything started.”
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