Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at an NHS inclusion-health garden in Edinburgh, this paper examines competing moral economies of care. It argues that institutional processes of clinical purification render forms of care beyond biomedical norms illegible.

Paper long abstract

Across the UK, green social prescribing and 'green health' partnerships have become unique features of healthcare reform, positioning gardens and other greenspaces as experimental sites for cultivating healthier futures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within NHS Scotland's 'Our Natural Health Service,' this paper examines how therapeutic landscapes become spaces where competing moral economies of care circulate. I focus on a garden attached to The Access Place, an NHS inclusion-health service for people experiencing homelessness and other forms of complex care need in Edinburgh.

Through the stories of two participants, Brian and Roy, I argue that the garden fosters forms of multispecific solidarity in which care is enacted through relations with plants, labour, vulnerability, and shared dependency. Brian's cosmology of humans and trees articulates an ethical vision of common need that, at The Access Place, was treated clinically as psychosis. Roy's sustained care for the garden and its users was eclipsed by institutional concerns over violence and risk. These cases demonstrate how therapeutic gardens operate under the institutional logics that sustain them, simultaneously inviting alternative practices of care whilst delimiting which forms of care can be recognized as legitimate.

I describe this tension as a form of symbolic violence via a process of clinical purification: the institutional work through which relational, spiritual, and politically charged forms of care are rendered illegible when they exceed biomedical norms. Rather than existing outside institutional medicine, therapeutic gardens reveal how contemporary experiments in green healthcare reproduce the moral boundaries through which care itself is governed.