`Healing garden' restorative for patients, staff.

Byline: The Register-Guard

LEBANON - When patients, family members and staff members at Lebanon Community Hospital need a break or a breath of fresh air, they step out into a courtyard and find themselves in a peaceful oasis.

Gently sloping gravel pathways wind past mature Japanese maple and black pine trees, native plantings, hulking boulders, two gazebos and three waterfalls that flow into a koi pond.

This 11,250-square-foot "healing garden" was designed by Hoichi Kurisu, a landscape architect with offices in Portland and Florida who has won national awards - first place last year in the Health Care Environment Award Competition. Just as important, it has won raves from patients and staff at the 25-bed rural hospital, part of the Samaritan Health Services chain.

"It changes your inner feelings about what's happened to you," said heart patient Frank Caro, a regular visitor to the garden. `It makes you realize, `There's an end to all this. I am going to get better.' '

The garden was the brainchild of Bill Rauch, a Lebanon accountant and president of the hospital foundation. He got to know Kurisu when he spent six months in Japan on an exchange program in college.

Within hospital circles, Rauch began hearing of the importance of creating healing environments. And he knew of Kurisu's interest in the way gardens can help people feel better, he said.

Rauch and the foundation pitched the idea of the healing garden to the hospital administration, which approved, and the fund-raising began. The foundation raised $450,000 to build the garden, which was completed at the end of 2004.

"I feel this has changed the whole attitude of the hospital," Rauch said. "The garden probably has more of an impact on the employees than it does on anyone else. If employees are happy and encouraging, that's where people are going to go."

The garden is enclosed on four sides: by a hospital corridor, a meeting room, the labor and delivery wing, and a new infusion therapy unit called the Emenhiser Center.

The infusion center, where patients come for chemotherapy and similar treatments that require sitting in one place for as long as 10 hours, boasts the best views of the garden.

As the patients sit in reclining chairs, they look out floor-to-ceiling windows at the garden and the koi pond, said Jan Hall, the center's manager. They can watch television, but most prefer to look at the garden. "They find it relaxing as well as distracting," she said.

The garden, an assembly of dirt, rocks, water and plants, has proven to be much more than the sum of its parts. It's likely the garden has paid for itself, Rauch said, by attracting patients and contributions, and by improving the morale and performance of the staff.

"Like throwing a pebble in a pond," Rauch said, "it creates ripples."

- Tim Christie