by Vladimir ZHIROV, RAS Corresponding Member, Polar Alpine Botanical Gardens and Research Center (PABSI), RAS Kola Research Center, director; Cand. Sc. (Biol.), Oksana GONTAR, PABSI deputy director

Ecological gardens are a great health booster, especially for people living in arctic polar regions-like Murmansk. Such ecogardens are common in Europe and in America helping to offset negative natural and anthropogenic factors. Unfortunately health gardens have gained but a slim toehold in our country. Therapeutic gardening, meanwhile, is an important and promising trend. One such garden is located on the Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk area.

ECOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE

The Kola health garden and research center (PABSI) lies in the heart of a local highland, the Khibini Mountains, it is Russia's northernmost, the first of the world's three within the Arctic Circle, and the oldest RAS institution in the Murmansk region.

The garden was laid out in August of 1931. In those days Ivan Michurin, a talented Russian gardener and horticulturist, came into prominence: his guiding idea was that man should change, remake nature. - Wait no mercies from Nature, just seize whatever you want. Ecological consciousness came decades later.

Yet the very fact-that the alpine health garden was set up next to a booming industrial district-is significant as proof positive of ecological awareness among Murmansk regional heads.

From the first the priority goal of that garden was to grow plants taken from other regions to beautify local towns and communities. Several generations of PABSI botanists have cultivated thousands of transplants from many countries to enrich the plant kingdom of the Russian Far North. Today the PABSI health garden has more than 1,300 plant species, with 200 medicinal ones among them. Resistant and productive species have been selected for planting in northern cities, industrial districts and orchards. The planting pool is always renovated. In 2008 it comprised 43 plant and 83 shrub species as well as 4 liana and 197 grass varieties. Today all local cities and towns grow trees, shrubs and lawns brought in from PABSI.

PABSI, A FOUR-H GARDEN

PABSI explorations came to be appreciated from the very start, and the demand for health-garden acclimated plants ran high in Kola towns and communities. A good deal is being done in instilling ecological mind sets among people. Nikolai Avrorin (1906-1991), an eminent geobotanist, and founder of the Murmansk ecogarden and its first director, outlined the objectives for the garden-to-be in 1931, its foundation year: "Every part of the Garden should be geared to these two main goals-economic husbandry and, intimately bound up with it, culture and enlightenment."

For many years the garden confined its educational activities to popularizing achievements in plant cul-

tivation and acclimation; this was done during guided nature walks, and in popular lectures on gardening and horticulture. The health garden is expanding its work in this field: each year as many as 10,000 visit it, with 600 guided excursions arranged to cater its guests. College students of many home and foreign universities come here for their biology and ecology practicals in studying living plant collections, also in parts off limits to the public at large. In fact, PABSI is a "Four-H" garden teaching skills in agriculture and home economics. This garden is a head institution affiliated with the Geoecology Department of Murmansk State Technical University and the Ecology Department of the Kola branch of Petrozavodsk State University. While paying great attention to the integration of research and higher education, our nurturists do not leave out school pupils and even preschoolers. There are two elective educational programs, "Plant Kingdom" (for schoolchildren), and "Roundabout Northern Nature" (for preschool children).

PABSI is stepping up its health-building efforts as an important part of social policies aimed also at boosting the geopolitical role of the Far North on a national scale. Unfortunately, harsh climatic conditions and environmental hazards are having an adverse effect on public health. Also, on psychic and mental health. According to the regional Public Health Ministry, close to 10,000 people are affected with psychic and nervous disorders (around 1 percent of the population), with the morbidity rate on the uptrend.

New avenues had to be explored in social and therapeutic activities. These efforts have fructified to some extent in targeted sanitation and rehabilitation programs based on collections of living plants nurtured in the garden and meant, among other things, for neurotic and psychic cases.

GARDENING AND ECOLOGICAL THERAPY

The American Association of Garden Therapeutists (AAGT) defines garden therapy (gardenother-apy, therapeutic gardening) as a discipline making skilled use of plants and gardening for health rehabilitation purposes. Such therapy is designed to stimulate social adaptation and behavioral correction through communication with the plant kingdom and, in part, with animals.

In these last five years PABSI, collaborating with Murmansk medical, social and educational institutions, has got down to new methods of social adaptation for people suffering from various nervous and psychic diseases. And so a number of rehabilitation programs have been elaborated, such as "Gardenotherapy for Children and Adolescents", "Ecotherapy for Child Invalids Affected with Psychoneurological Diseases", and "Ecotherapy for Children with Speech Defects". These programs, now in practical use, have been in for kudos from medics and health institutions in Murmansk region towns as combining both active and passive garden therapy. The active therapy, most popular in the West, gets patients to be busy with plant cultivation. This method, studied best, is not essentially different from conventional labor therapy in the farm industry.

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE GARDEN THERAPY

But still we have no theory in what concerns passive garden therapy that involves contemplation and meditation amidst plant landscapes, though this approach is highly effective as shown by our experi-

ence of many years. Lately PABSI naturalists jointly with other Murmansk social workers have been evolving scientific methods of setting up health landscapes for different groups of patients.

They are studying the space and color perception in people showing various psychic and neurotic disorders. The thing is that certain psychic and neurological pathologies may be related to changes in spatial and color perception among patients that could make them essentially different from healthy people in the geometry of their perceptive spaces, say, in the dimensionality of the zones of linear and reverse perspectives. At worst such anomalies may interfere with a patient's bearings and may be conducive to symptoms of autism.

A lasting contemplation of such health landscapes with an adequate solid geometry and color gamut may help correct spatial aberrations in perception. Experts are handling such cases proceeding from model psychological tests, now and then in small landscapes built by patients themselves. No constraints are involved, save the choice of a proper landscape and its makeup. Such therapeutic landscapes may differ in size-from toy, table landscapes to flower beds. In this fashion one can combine research into a patient's visual preferences with the garden therapy, passive and active alike.

Recreational ecotherapy is a promising trend, in particular for Murmansk and other northern regions where the combined effect of anthropogenic, man-caused and natural factors is a major health hazard. Although such health gardens and arboretums are common in Europe and America, they are still spotty here in Russia. There are positive changes, however: thus, in November of 2013 the Council of Russia's Botanical Gardens set up a commission with four Russian botanical gardens, PABSI among them, as members. Further progress of garden therapy is an important step in the all-out use of the innovative potential of the Murmansk Polar Alpine Garden and Research Center, PABSI.