This essay is part of our Member Essay series, in which we invite members to share new perspectives on Creative Health.
Candy Zhang is a therapeutic horticulture practitioner working with AAGarden. Her work focuses on supporting migrants and non-native English speakers across the UK who face language barriers and social isolation.
This piece was written in response to our 2026 callout theme, The State of the World, Politics and Creative Health, exploring the intersections of Creative Health with migration, language, power, and access.
With many thanks for Candy for this member essay.
In recent years, Creative Health has gained increasing recognition within the UK public health landscape. Often framed as a valuable approach to reducing loneliness and supporting recovery, it is now an integral component of social prescribing. However, within a context of political instability and economic precarity, a critical tension emerges: Is Creative Health merely a “sticking plaster” helping individuals adapt to unequal systems, or can it create radical spaces where new forms of belonging take root?
London is a city shaped by precarity. High living costs, insecure housing, visa uncertainty, language hierarchies, and widening social inequalities define the everyday experience of many residents, particularly migrants and non-native English speakers. In therapeutic horticulture projects with migrants and non-native English speakers in London, participants’ psychological distress often reflects structural conditions rather than isolated “mental health problems”: insecure contracts, cultural displacement, experiences of radicalisation, academic pressures, and the fatigue of constantly performing in a second language.
In such a context, Creative Health interventions can easily be framed as mere buffering mechanisms, providing brief respite or momentary relief through gardening and arts workshops. However, if these practices remain focused solely on individual resilience or helping people adapt to neoliberal systems, they risk absorbing the psychological shocks of inequality without addressing its root causes. By emphasising individual coping alone, Creative Health can inadvertently reproduce the very conditions that generate distress in the first place.
To challenge this passive adaptation, collective and land-based creative practices reveal another potential. In a four-week therapeutic horticulture workshop held in London with the Latin American community, the majority of participants were women who primarily identified as caregivers: mothers, daughters, or community supporters. Through structured activities, these women began to reposition themselves as knowledge holders, sharing cultivation techniques, seasonal wisdom, and food traditions from their countries of origin. Crucially, this was not about bringing seeds from home; instead, participants used UK-grown seeds, nurturing them while intertwining them with the stories and heritage of their homelands. Gardening became a medium for exchanging cultural memory, a process of grafting identity onto new soil.
This repositioning was manifested through tangible engagement: as women planted for themselves and tended seedlings over weeks, they gradually constructed a sense of ownership and agency that extended far beyond the garden space. The workshop sessions facilitated this by inviting participants to choose plants that reflect their emotional state, to share vegetables and recipes from their home cultures while planting collectively, and to create personal arrangements from the seedlings they have nurtured. Physical labour, digging, watering, pruning, and carrying compost, slows the nervous system and provides embodied processing of emotion. By prioritising these structured yet gentle interventions, the project allows expression to occur through action rather than performance, enabling migrants and non-native English speakers to participate fully and confidently.
Session 1: “Which Flower Am I?” & Session 2: “Do We Eat the Same?”
Furthermore, this land-based practice introduces a sense of time that contrasts sharply with the competitive, extractive logic of urban life. Because plants cannot be hurried and growth follows seasonal rhythms rather than quarterly targets, the garden demands a different mental pace. In a city where property is increasingly privatised, the act of caring for a shared plot of land is a form of micro-infrastructure. It fosters a sense of collective ownership and proves that belonging is not a fixed status granted by a state, but an ongoing process grown through everyday practices of care.
Over these four weeks, small acts, watering a neighbor’s seedling, exchanging a recipe, built a resilient web of mutual support. The results were tangible: participants’ physical, emotional, and planting experiences all improved or remained stable, showing they felt more confident, connected, and engaged. Land enables belonging, and belonging sustains community. Therapeutic horticulture thus extends beyond emotional wellbeing, offering conditions for “rooting” in both soil and society. Participants experience micro-stability and equitable participation. Conversations emerge naturally, where migration, language, and social pressures are acknowledged without being pathologised. The garden becomes a space where care is embodied, knowledge is shared, and social relations are rehearsed.
“Which plants or garden element reflects how you feel?”
This question invites you to reflect on your feelings and connect with the garden environment
However, the long-term impact of such practices remains tied to a systemic challenge: the political orientation of Creative Health depends on its framing and funding. As social prescribing expands, the risk of instrumentalisation rises, where these relational, slow, and embodied processes are reduced to short-term quantitative outcomes. The tension lies in whether Creative Health remains accountable primarily to the performance metrics of institutions, or truly to communities experiencing structural inequality.
Over the four weeks, participants’ physical, emotional, and planting experiences all improved or remained stable, showing they felt more confident, connected, and engaged.
In a precarious city, these grounded gardening practices offer more than coping mechanisms. They create micro-spaces where dignity, cultural memory, and collective care can flourish. By centering land, embodied practice, and shared responsibility, Creative Health becomes both a method of individual support and a rehearsal for alternative social relations. To move forward, it must move beyond short-term “buffering” and invest in long-term, relational infrastructures. Sustaining these benefits depends on continued recognition and collaboration with local authorities, health systems, and funders. With their support, projects can continue to nurture slow, collective, and inclusive practices that help participants build lasting connections, resilience, and a sense of belonging. Ultimately, Creative Health grows stronger when practice, policy, and community work together. Care is infrastructure, and through soil and hands, participants root themselves, physically, socially, and emotionally.
*If you want to learn more about the AAGarden participants’ stories, workshop practices, and related data, you can check out the zine created for this workshop, which documents rich first-hand experiences and observations.
*We also welcome institutions or interested individuals to collaborate in exploring and researching the potential and practice of Therapeutic Horticulture among migrant and non-native English-speaking communities. Please contact us at aagardenuk@outlook.com or visit aagarden.org if you are interested in collaborating.
Written by: Candy Zhang
Member essays form part of our commissioned blog series. Members are invited to pitch stories reflecting on their views and creative practice. Views are members’ own.