Nature and Mental Health: Gardens and Other Spaces for Healing
Budapest
The Healing Garden Living Lab of the COEVOLVERS project will join the week of New European Bauhaus Festival by organising its final events on 11 and 12 June, 2026. In the morning of 11 June, a guided tour in the healing garden of the Boldog Gellért Psychiatric Hospital will be organised. Participants will be invited to join the hospital’s garden coordinator and the landscape architects who produced the a healing garden master plan based on a 3-year long multispecies participatory process. After the garden walk, a nature-based creative session is offered to participants facilitated by the hospital’s art therapeutist and the visual researcher of the project.
Next day, on 12 June, a full-day professional programme is offered, inviting multiple and diverse disciplines and professions who work at the intersection of nature and mental health. The event will offer a meeting point for Hungary-based experts to exchange their perspectives and practices on the complex topic of nature and mental health. The programme starts with a video on the Healing Garden Living Lab, then proceeds with a roundtable discussion (first session) where multiple academic scholars and practitioners will exchange ideas about the current knowledge and existing practices from the perspectives of clinical psychology, ecology, environmental and health psychology, and psychiatry. The second session will showcase ongoing therapeutic practices that collaborate with nature to improve mental health for diverse social groups. An exhibition is also organised that will show the creative artefacts the clients of the Boldog Gellért Psychiatric Hospital created during art-based therapy sessions over the years, nature letters that were prepared from a posthuman perspective by a professional fantasy writer, a digital nature tool being created by designers for people who are not able to enjoy nature directly, and a surprise piece of art from the visual researcher of the project. Next (fourth session) is occupied by presentation on a posthuman perspective representing bioethics, more-than-human design, and environmental humanities. Last but not least, the project landscape architects and the hospital’s garden coordinator will invite participants about an exchange on hospital gardens as spaces for mutual care.
The events will be in Hungarian and, on the first day, can receive twenty participants, while, on the second day, approx. hundred participants are expected in an atmosphere of mutual respect and peer learning.
