The Vegetable Garden for All: Twenty Years of Horticultural Therapy Experiences at the “Animal Farm” in Ladispoli (Rome, Italy)

Contact with nature has always been recognized as having a positive and relaxing effect on people; horticultural therapy is one of the latest forms of unconventional therapy, which uses plants to improve physical and mental condition. Horticultural therapy activities, after a long experimental phase dating back to the 1960s, are now a consolidated practice in the USA, Canada and Europe. In Italy, social farming has developed in a more organic way since the early 2000’S: there are no pre-established models and the various social agriculture projects, in recent years, have aimed to develop good practices starting from personal experience in the field rather than from codified models. The Animal Farm, social farm in Ladispoli (Rome, Italy), has developed a functional model based on twenty years of experience in the period 2003 – 2024, which is reported in the present work. The mixed experience of informative educational activities and rehabilitation activities allowed farm’s visitors to come into contact with the participants in the workshop and this increased people's awareness of the problems of people with disabilities. The workshops are organized in daily activities where the various local institutions bring their users (either individuals or groups) to carry out agricultural activities and practical workshops. The path followed is aimed at people with medium and severe mental disabilities. The workshop is structured in two levels of activity: routine works and creative work. The experiments implemented within the horticultural therapy paths in the Animal Farm of Ladispoli (Rome, Italy) confirm the key role of agricultural activities in rehabilitation programs for disabled people and in the present work the positive effects observed in the workshops are reported.