Introduction

In everyday life, plants often serve as quiet companions and sources of nourishment, evoking deep emotional responses and sensory memories. Within the space of psychodrama, individuals engage in role-playing and symbolic enactment to explore inner emotions and relational dynamics. These two healing modalities – horticultural therapy and psychodrama – might appear distinct, yet in practice they reveal profound intersections, particularly in the realms of sensory awareness, symbolic transformation, and nonverbal expression.

This article is grounded in practice-based reflection and conceptual synthesis, drawing from the author’s facilitation of approximately 20 therapeutic group sessions between 2019 and 2024 in Taiwan. These sessions engaged diverse populations – including young adults, caregivers, and trauma survivors – and were conducted in community, educational, and spiritual settings. The integrative model of horticultural psychodrama emerged through iterative observation, symbolic mapping, and post-session journalling. While the article does not present empirical data or formal case studies, it adheres to ethical standards of confidentiality, informed consent, and cultural sensitivity. The reflections presented are rooted in lived experience and theoretical dialogue, with the aim of initiating scholarly conversation and future empirical exploration.

A note on language and pronouns: to honour the sentience and active presence of plants within this integrative framework, this article intentionally moves away from referring to plants as inanimate objects (i.e. using “it”). Instead, gender-neutral personal pronouns such as “they/them” are employed throughout the text when plants are positioned as roles, emotional figures, or auxiliary egos. This linguistic choice reflects the therapeutic core of horticultural psychodrama, which views the botanical world as an active and responsive partner in the relational healing journey rather than a mere cluster of symbolic props. 

There are currently no theoretical frameworks or practical models that explicitly integrate these two modalities. This article seeks to initiate a conceptual and operational exploration of how horticultural therapy can enter the psychodramatic arena, propose an integrative model and outline its theoretical foundations and potential applications. The proposed model of horticultural psychodrama is situated within transdisciplinary expressive arts therapy, drawing from psychodramatic theory, ecopsychology, and embodied healing practices.  Horticultural psychodrama does not aim to replace existing modalities, but rather to bridge symbolic action and nature-based engagement through a relational and sensory-centered framework. By clarifying the roles of plants as therapeutic media, symbolic co-actors, and embodied stimuli, this model contributes to the evolving dialogue between action-based and ecologically-grounded psychotherapies.

Psychodrama: Action-based self-exploration

Psychodrama, founded by J.L. Moreno, is an action-oriented, psychotherapeutic method that emphasises experiential enactment and role-playing. It invites individuals to step onto the “psychodramatic stage” and re-experience significant life moments through body movement, voice, spatial arrangement, and symbolic representation. Unlike talk-based therapies, psychodrama uses embodied action to facilitate emotional release, self-awareness, and relational transformation.

A typical psychodrama session consists of three phases: warming-up, action, and sharing. Its structural elements include five core components – protagonist, director, auxiliary ego, stage, and audience (Moreno, 1953). Techniques such as empty chair, role reversal, doubling, mirroring, and soliloquy are used to deepen emotional insight and promote behavioural change. These are not merely technical tools, but also ethical practices that support participants in ‘living again’ within a safe and respectful environment.

Within the author’s clinical practice, particular attention has been given to the use of symbolic roles – roles that are not necessarily human, but may represent emotions, beliefs, dreams, or even plants. This symbolic and action-based quality makes psychodrama a fertile ground for integrating nature-based interventions. It is within this context that the exploration of plants as co-actors began to unfold, recognising that they can participate in relational transformation on the psychodramatic stage.

Horticultural therapy: Theoretical foundations and healing practice of plants

Horticultural therapy is a therapeutic approach that uses plants and gardening activities as mediums to promote physical, emotional, cognitive, and social well-being. Its core lies not in “what is grown”, but in how individuals reconnect with their bodies, emotions, memories, and life rhythms through interaction with plants. According to the American Horticultural Therapy Association (AHTA), horticultural therapy is a structured, plant-centered intervention led by trained professionals, involving planting, nurturing, observing, and creating with plants to support holistic healing (AHTA, 2022).

The theoretical foundations of horticultural therapy are drawn from ecopsychology, sensory integration, and rehabilitation-oriented occupational therapy. Pioneering work in environmental psychology, including Kaplan and Kaplan’s (1989) development of Attention Restoration Theory (ART), alongside Relf’s (1992) conceptualisation of socio-horticulture, highlights how interaction with nature may support cognitive and psychological well-being. Within the Taiwanese therapeutic context, this model has been further grounded and adapted by local scholars such as Shen (2016), who synthesised cross-disciplinary green healing applications, and Lin and Yang (2020), who advanced an ecopsychological perspective on somatic and sensory rehabilitation. Within these frameworks, plants can function as nonverbal media that evoke sensory memories, emotional projections, and awareness of life cycles. Their forms, textures, and growth patterns can become languages open to interpretation. The openness and symbolic nature of horticultural activities can create inclusive spaces for diverse cultural and personal experiences.

Although horticultural therapy does not explicitly adopt narrative therapy as a core framework, its practice often reveals narrative qualities. Participants may assign symbolic meanings to plants, projecting emotions, memories, or relational histories onto them. Through planting, caring for, or observing plants, individuals may naturally recount personal stories or reinterpret their life experiences through the metaphor of plant life – growth, decay, and regeneration.

These nonverbal narrative processes are not necessarily expressed through language, but emerge through embodied sensation, sensory memory, and symbolic interaction. The different stages of the life cycle of plants – germination, withering, and rebirth – can serve as metaphors for personal transformation, and may be enacted within psychodramatic space as roles, scenes, or emotional representations. While not part of narrative therapy’s formal techniques, this resonance with its spirit of honouring subjectivity and rewriting life stories offers a meaningful point of convergence within horticultural psychodrama.

The author’s practice involves creating spaces where participants engage in dialogue with plants, allowing plants to evoke inner sensations or memories and inviting participants to assign personal meaning. This healing process shares unexpected resonance with psychodrama’s emphasis on symbolism and action.

The form of plant material and the setting also matter. Living plants can invite attention through their vitality, growth, and sensory qualities, whereas detached or dried materials may carry different temporal and symbolic resonances. Although dried plants no longer display present growth, they may still evoke memory and projection; for example, a dried bouquet may call forth a relationship that has ended but remains cherished. This article primarily considers the use of botanical materials within facilitated group settings and does not attempt a full comparison of indoor and outdoor practice, or of living and detached plant materials.

Roles of plants across psychodrama phases

Plants are not fixed symbolic props but are open-ended media that invite participants to choose, project, interpret, and interact freely. In this integrative model, plants are introduced into the three phases of psychodrama – warming-up, action, and sharing – with each serving distinct therapeutic functions. The following section discusses these phases through examples drawn primarily from a university-based growth group in Taiwan, as well as from other sessions facilitated in the author’s therapeutic practice.

Warming-up phase

In the warming-up phase, plants can act as open presences that may evoke relational sensations and emotional awareness. For some participants, they may bring a sense of familiarity, unspoken emotion, or unnamed longing; for others, the experience may remain more tentative or neutral. This design aligns with a key principle in embodied psychotherapy: awareness may begin with bodily sensation and, when conditions feel sufficiently safe, language and reflection can follow.

Siegel’s (2012) interpersonal neurobiology emphasises that bodily perception is shaped by interpersonal interaction and sensory experience. The tactile textures, scents, colours, and forms of plants can evoke somatic and autobiographical memories associated with emotion and relationships. Levine (2010) also notes that traumatic memories may be held in nonverbal, sensory, and motoric forms and may be approached through embodied action and awareness.

Thus, using plants in the warming-up phase is not merely sensory stimulation, but can be an active process of embodied awareness. Through touching a leaf, smelling a flower, or arranging a branch, participants may begin to attend to bodily sensations and to emotions or relational experiences that have not yet been verbalised. This process may support the emergence of protagonists and the surfacing of core issues.

To illustrate this experiential transition, the author facilitated a Floor Assessment, an action-based technique developed by Tian Dayton (2014), within a university-based growth group in Taiwan using raw botanical media. The author first arranged discarded tree branches on the floor in the shape of a large symbolic tree (see Figure 1). Participants were invited to move their bodies directly around the tree and select the position that felt most emotionally salient in the present moment. This provided an initial embodied assessment of their current experience. Participants were then invited to consider whether they were at the roots, trunk, branches, or treetop. After choosing and standing in a position, each participant was invited to use Role Reversal with that part of the tree and to describe the view and feelings from its perspective (see Figure 2). The Director used the Double technique, where appropriate, by tentatively offering words for emerging feelings while leaving participants free to confirm, modify, or reject them. Participants then selected branches that resonated with them and engaged with them through touching, feeling, and weaving. This sequence offered an embodied route from spatial positioning to symbolic expression, while allowing central therapeutic themes to emerge at each participant’s own pace.