Caring local biodiversity in a healing garden: Therapeutic benefits in young subjects with autism

Contact with nature and care of gardens are assumed to have important therapeutic functions. This work is an open pilot study exploring the potentiality of caring local biodiversity in a healing garden as a tool to promote multi-purpose ecosystem services and social benefits. A group of "Biodiversity Custodians", composed by young people with autism spectrum disorder, was constituted to realize a healing garden in Morrano di Orvieto (TR, Umbria, Italy) with the aim to carry out an integrated approach for conservation of crop landraces. This approach provided opportunities for nature contact and synergistic inter-personal exchanges in a more biodiverse environment and socio-cultural context, leading to a significant improvement of the rehabilitative objectives effectiveness in the participants, especially regarding their social skills and interpersonal relationships. In addition, a series of agronomical, plant physiological and biochemical/nutritional functional traits were determined and proposed as cost-effective and reliable tools to set-up screening and evaluation tests of landraces germplasm. Hence, the care of "life diversity" at plant, human and socio-cultural level in the healing garden was the basis for the promotion of ecosystem services and health care roles, pursuing two main crucial goals: i) the improvement of health, subjective well-being and interpersonal relationships in highly vulnerable people of local community and ii) the conservation and valorisation of local biodiversity by the care of crop landraces, the acquisition of relevant historical and functional data useful for local farmers, breeders and researchers and by transfer of this heritage to future generations. Therefore, this pilot study demonstrated as proper management of healing gardens may represent a concrete way to promote health care intervention and both agro-biodiversity and cultural diversity, leading to a widespread improvement of the environmental protection and human well-being.