Find
joy, connection
and healing
Hi, I’m Stephanie, the Creator of Garden Therapy, where you will find hundreds of garden-related projects, crafts, and recipes to help you live a better life through plants.
I believe that anyone can feel immediate benefits
from spending a short while outdoors, digging in the earth, and connecting with all that gardening brings.
Gardening is my number one passion, and I have spent years mastering the craft of soil, plants, and Mother Earth. In my mission to spread better living through plants, I have trained to become a Master Gardener in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. While my garden lies in the Pacific Northwest, my readers come from all over the world.
Throughout my time as a gardener, I expanded my training by learning herbalism, permaculture design, natural skincare formulation, and soap making. You will find a ton of content on Garden Therapy exploring my unique skill set, from cold process soap recipes all the way to natural herbal remedies. I am also an award-winning author with 12 books and counting. I love hosting workshops and leading speaking events.
Garden Therapy is for you whether you are a seasoned gardener or a brand-new sprout!
Each week, I share new gardening ideas, DIY projects, crafts, plant-based beauty, and recipes related to gardening, or you can check out our most popular projects. Hopefully, what you see will encourage you to dig in and get a little Garden Therapy of your own.
Why Garden Therapy?
On July 10, 2006, I got a headache.
That headache became an illness that lasted for almost 9 years.
The headache morphed into pain and paralysis accompanied by crippling fatigue. I spent the rest of that year in bed and much of the following year as well.
After a year-and-a-half of pain and sleeping my life away, I started to regain enough energy to make little steps. Simple tasks, like walking or holding a hairbrush, felt like momentous feats of strength. I had to learn to use my body again.
As the spring arrived in that third year, I ventured outside.
I couldn’t go far, so I looked to my own yard for activity. I decided to build a garden and rebuild my health at the same time. I borrowed books on gardening from the library and experimented in my yard, even for just 5 minutes each time. Gradually, I was hooked.
The following year, I ventured into vegetable gardening.
With more books from the library, some seed catalogues, and an empty backyard, I continued my education. After many years of backyard vegetable growing at least 100 different varieties, I was now an edible gardener as well. See the transformation of my backyard garden here.
Since then, I’ve also got into canning, fermenting, sourdough cultures, cheese-making, soap-making as well. I ate food I had grown from seed, made all of my own beauty and cleaning products, and worked every day in an organic garden.
I would argue there isn’t a better recovery program in the world!
GardenTherapy.ca
I registered the GardenTherapy.ca domain and began to share the projects that I was working on in the garden.
Each time I showed one of my finished projects or a few flowers from the garden, I would get emails asking how I did it.
My articles, projects, and recipes on Garden Therapy still follow the idea of sharing my personal take on gardens and crafting from natural materials, but I work hard to share each step with photos so that others can recreate them.
My hope is that this website is a place where people who love plants can find joy, connection, and healing.
© Garden Therapy 2008-2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Garden Therapy with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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