Funding awarded by the NHS Tayside Charitable Foundation enabled SAMH to expand Growing Chrysalis into a thriving, year-long therapeutic garden programme. Designed to remove all financial barriers, the project provided a varied mix of free horticultural, physical, and creative wellbeing activities:
Green Minds Gardening: Weekly hands-on nature and vegetable growing sessions led by Therapeutic Horticulturalists.
Outdoor Yoga & Mindfulness: Free, accessible weekly classes held in the garden in collaboration with a local yoga instructor.
Outdoor Kitchen & Cooking Classes: Group cooking sessions using fresh, garden-grown produce to encourage healthy living and social connection.
Early Years Groups: Specialized weekly sessions helping young children and their carers connect with nature early in life.
Community Events & Festivals: Inclusivity-focused events like the Secret Garden Trail and Summer Festival to welcome new visitors and families into the space.
1. Outstanding Reach & Engagement
4,285 community members engaged in horticultural and wellbeing sessions throughout the funded period.
The garden earned an outstanding review from Keep Scotland Beautiful, recognising it as a well-loved, highly utilised integral community asset.
2. Mental Health & Personal Resilience
Participants reported significant, life-changing improvements in their mental health, self-esteem, and recovery journeys:
Self-Management: Participants gained concrete outdoor tools to manage day-to-day stress, anxiety, and confidence levels.
Rehabilitation & Space: Provided a crucial recovery space for individuals navigating major physical and mental health challenges, such as stroke and heart attack recovery.
Pathways to Independence: Group engagement served as a stepping stone to further opportunities, such as regular volunteering with the local Rangers service.
3. Combatting Isolation & Building Friendship
The garden created an informal, pressure-free environment where people built lasting friendships, shared experiences, and developed a strong sense of community belonging.
"I’ve been attending Growing Chrysalis since I had a stroke and heart attack which affected my mental health. It has allowed me the space to get better, be involved in the community, and the garden has nurtured me as much as I have tried to nurture it."
Agile, Weekly Feedback Loops: The project team continuously reviewed activity feedback on a weekly basis, allowing them to rapidly adapt classes and sessions based on real-time community needs.
Strengthening Digital Networks: A key area identified for future development is expanding cross-organisational social media networking to share ideas, resources, and referrals across the region.
Lessons Learned & Best Practice
Moving Beyond Reminiscence: Early consultation with Alzheimer Scotland revealed that centering activities purely on memory can be counter-productive. Focusing on the “here and now” validated the participants’ current capabilities and boosted self-esteem.
The Power of Adaptive Delivery: Balancing the administrative need for advanced planning with an artist’s need for creative fluidity was a key learning curve. PTCH successfully managed this by issuing highly detailed, iterative weekly session plans after the artist could properly gauge group dynamics and energy levels.
Trust Facilitates Documentation: By participating in the actual exercises instead of remaining behind a lens, the project’s filmmaker built deep communal trust. This directly resulted in participants feeling entirely comfortable and confident when the time came to record individual interviews and formal poetry readings.
