The Cloister Healing Garden, designed by landscape architect Carter van Dyke, was built in 2000 in a courtyard bordered by the hospital’s cafeteria and three glass-walled walkways. Visitors inside and out enjoy its Japanese Walk, Tea House, and Grassy Knoll.

Enter the Japanese Walk near the Japanese style “deer chaser,” a fountain of stone and bamboo that gently alerts deer to human presence. Wooden benches in cozy nooks, bamboo and an arresting array of foliage lead the way. A cement path keeps everyone spiffy.

Benches modeled after Japanese ones await the contemplative and those who wish to rest a bit. Black basalt boulders from Japan are placed here and there: how can something so hard be so soothing to see?

A grove of cryptomeria and sweet bay magnolia rise from a bed of St. John’s Wort beside a hospital wall. Toward the Grassy Knoll, little nooks of patio tables and chairs near magnolia and river birch beg to be used for dining, reading, or just relaxing. In warmer times, phlox flounces over New England granite and perennials fill out the beds.

Duck into the cafeteria, where the Tea House (an imaginative garden-cafeteria entrance) offers a picture-perfect view of the world outside. This is characteristic in Japanese gardens and is also used at the National Garden in Washington, DC, van Dyke says.

From inside, the viewer can see the Cloister Healing Garden and enjoy all it has to offer including a pebble beach around softly flowing water with koi. Rocks line one shore of its embankment, supporting oak, cypress, maple, spruce, Japanese zelkova and tall bamboo. Cattail, sIberian iris, and azalea line the other shore and sidewalk. Beyond, a grassy knoll rises, intersected by the winding path. In winter, the Cloister Garden brings a special comfort to everyone.

Tamutyte also designed the ICU Green Roof Garden over the radiology department. It grows between two wings of rooms, where patients can see it from their windows and the glassed-in hallways of numerous floors. The view is always important medicine.

Here, the concept is the healing power of weaving. Just as each patient’s story is different, so are the colorful bands of sedum that reach between patients’ rooms. Paths, like threads on a loom, criss-cross this living tapestry. The garden, planted with about 1,700 sedum plugs in 2007, will be filled in by 2010.

Recycled rubber pavers symbolize the “warp,” the first threads stretched across a loom before weaving begins. That structure is the hospital and community, including the Community League, who raised funds for the garden. PECO also helped through a $25,000 Sustainable Redevelopment Fund grant, a fifth of the cost.

When weaving, the weft are threads that weave between the warp. They represent life force. “Even if you look from one room into another you see the wavy lines and it appears as if these lines go into the building like mirrors,” says Tamutyte.

Sedums adapt to extreme drought by going dormant. "I have seen presentations that when it rains in three hours they look green again," Tamutyte says. "The symbolic meaning that the moment when the person is in the hospital his strength is compromised, there is hope that once healing takes place he make 'green up' again."

Structural issues:
- roof originally had 3 ¾ inches stone as ballast
- roof already at its maximum weight bearing capacity
- they could replace ballasted rocks
- substituted ballast weight with growing media, plant mass and saturation when the soil was wet
- rowing medium: expanded shale and recycled rubber with some organic matter
- should not need fertilizing
- white lines: white stones on pre-assembled square-foot pebble tiles, half-inch thick with a one-rock thickness
- squares: mostly recycled rubber pavers, light

The roof garden captures two inches of rainfall. It reduces peak runoff time by slowing the discharge, which reduces velocity, which further reduces erosion and flooding on the parking lot below. “It reduces the foot print of the building,” says Carter van Dyke.

One study showed that “the green roof should be expected to deliver between 5 and 11.5% savings on summer electricity consumption from initial planting to maturity. ...and that for storms which occur on average once every 10 years, the green roof will react like undeveloped open space; i.e., as though that portion of the building is still an open meadow.”
(from St. Mary Medical Center Green Roof Energy Analysis, a report by Jordan Richie, Dr. Brad Bass)

Read an interview with CEO Mr. Wozniak about the gardens.

Carter van Dyke Associates: www.cvda.com

* All photos courtesy Carter van Dyke Associates unless otherwise noted.