Are Gardens Restorative Environments? =- Assessing the Perceived Restorativeness of two Healing Gardens

The aim of this study is to investigate whether gardens are perceived as restorative and whether different gardens can be more or less restorative. Also, we hypothesized that students in landscape architecture have particular skills in detecting differences in outdoor environments. 41 psychology students and 33 landscape architecture students judged two different gardens using the Perceived Restorativeness Scale, PRS. The result indicates that the PRS was successful in assessing the restorative value of gardens. The PRS can be used as a tool for evaluating different gardens by comparing the different subscales and, as predicted, there were differences between the subject groups’ judgements of perceived restorativeness. The result has implications for our understanding of how we can design places intended to be restorative