In this study, the horticultural therapy was directly applied to elderly people living in facilities. In addition, a horticultural therapy program was performed with preschool children. The purpose of this is study is to investigate the effects of integrating horticulture with therapy on depression, interpersonal relationships, and activity of daily living(ADL), by reviving the nature-friendly character of humans and thereby fostering positive emotions. Horticultural therapy can be applied to anyone; nevertheless, it may be the foremost beneficial method of improving health of the elderly, for whom a loss of role could in fact catalyze mental and physical function in long periods of hobby. With a purpose as such, the subjects for this research were divided into control and experimental groups with 9 people in the experimental group and 9 people that did not participate in horticultural therapy in the control group. Horticultural therapy was performed with only the experimental group, and 13 trials were performed between March 29 to October 9, 2007. For analysis, the Wilcoxon Matched-paired Signed-Rank Test was used for a Solomon four-group design.
The results of this study are as follows:
First, horticultural therapy proved to be very effective in diminishing depression in the elderly.
Second, horticultural therapy resulted in marked improvement in the interpersonal relationships of the elderly.
Third, horticultural therapy resulted in a change in the value of ADL, but this was not statistically significant; thus, it can be seen that there was no marked change in terms of ADL. As a result, horticultural therapy aided the improvement of activity of daily living to a certain extent.
As shown above, the integrating horticultural therapy on interpersonal relationships and ADL was shown to be effective, and effective to a certain extent in terms of ADL.