Horticulture can promote health in many different ways. From green gyms in parks to ethnobotanical use of plants as medicines, there is growing awareness that gardening and plants can boost both physical and mental wellbeing.

Kew-trained ethnobotanist James Wong has made medicinal horticulture accessible with his BBC television series Grow Your Own Drugs, in which he showed how to mix medicines from common garden plants.

Wong trained at the University of Kent's Ethnobiology Laboratory. The course is a partnership between the university, the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Now also a lecturer, Wong aims to make the academic facts about plants relevant and exciting.

Wong describes his work as "real Harry Potter stuff", such as using Scotch Bonnet or habanero chillies to boost circulation and numb pain. He says: "People think you have to trek to the Amazon to find a rare plant and hand it to a Swiss pharmaceutical institute to turn into a drug. But this is a healthcare system that has evolved from cultures that don't have any access to healthcare."

Helping hand

Horticulture can help people in less direct ways too. The calming nature of horticultural work makes it suited to helping people with mental, physical or emotional problems.

Thrive is the biggest name in horticultural therapy and has helped set up a professional development diploma in social and therapeutic horticulture with Coventry University and Moreton Morrell College in Warwickshire. The year-long course offers five distance-based modules and college-based workshops.

Training and education manager Cath Rickhuss said the course has been running for 16 years and has produced 300 graduates, most of whom work as horticultural therapists and managers of horticulture units. There are about 1,000 projects country-wide offering social and therapeutic horticulture in community gardens, allotments, NHS hospitals and mental health units and prisons.

Salaries range from £12,000 to £20,000 for therapists depending on the number of people you look after and the setting, while managers can earn £20,000 to £25,000. You may be working with clients who have suffered from strokes or heart disease, have learning disabilities, mental health problems or dementia and you will need to develop individual programmes for everyone.

Rickhuss says: "At Thrive we aim to raise professionalism in the field of social and therapeutic horticulture by offering a professional diploma."

Thrive's Scottish counterpart Trellis has received Big Lottery funding to develop a diploma or similar course over the next couple of years. Development manager Mike Hamilton says people come into therapeutic gardening from the horticulture or occupational therapy side. They tend to do short courses to top-up knowledge in horticulture or occupational therapy as necessary.

Trellis is an umbrella organisation for 150 projects in Scotland for people with learning difficulties, those with physical problems undergoing rehab, in prisons, with vulnerable people and for those with mental problems - all developing gardening skills as therapy.

Hamilton says the benefits include helping people socially, helping develop gardening knowledge, benefiting health through growing fruit and veg and giving people a sense of wellbeing and all-round usefulness.

The physical and psychological benefits of working with plants and green spaces are now widely appreciated, and some doctors even prescribe such work to patients. Meeting this demand are 95 so-called "green gyms" around the country, organised by the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV). People typically meet for three hours a week of outdoor work, such as clearing paths in public green spaces.

Emphasis is placed on activities that involve the use of traditional tools and methods. These activities are often run by volunteers for local authorities, Primary Care Trusts and charities commissioned by BTCV with Green Gym licence. Jobs available are as BTCV development managers, overseeing the gyms.