TEN YEARS AGO, two psychologists and a landscape architect designed a study to answer the question of whether formal gardens—flat plots laid out in Euclidean figures, organized according to radial or bilateral symmetry and comprising bright manicured beds of sundry foliage—offer a more suitable environment for psychic rehabilitation than settings whose “natural” curvilinearity suggest a lack of intervention in a primordially rural terrain. The researchers took their cues from a handful of popular theses about the curative powers of the outdoors, most prominently those of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who believed the contemplation of organic scenes to be an incomparable balm for the sick soul. Using Amazon’s digital labor marketplace, the group recruited three hundred individuals to click through images of gardens wrought to varying degrees of formality and assess each space in terms of visual appeal, apparent naturalness, and—most importantly—“perceived restorative potential.” A slider allowed them to indicate on a scale of zero to one hundred the…
Hedgelords
