ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Just outside the hospital doors at Providence Medical Center Alaska, tucked behind the building, you’ll find a garden, one meant to heal and bring peace.
“This is a place of healing and hope,” said Joel Alsworth, Chief Mission Officer. “This garden is and was to create a space … where our caregivers, where our patients, where our families could have a chance to get out of the hospital and be able to experience nature.”
“It feels magical,” added Julia Sadowski, a clinical nurse specialist. “It feels like you’ve just entered a really special place where there aren’t beeps, there aren’t drips. There’s natural lighting versus artificial lighting, and people are often looking contemplative here.
“You walk in and it feels peaceful and joyful.”
The Healing Garden at PMCA was created 10 years ago, after a patient told his nurse that he wanted a magic carpet to be outside. That nurse and Sadowski, along with the gardener at PMCA, decided to create a healing garden.
“We’ve seen lots of people come into this space who are at lots of different points in their illness and healing, from learning about a diagnosis, to getting treatment, to realizing and hearing that they might not survive their diagnosis,” Sadowski said. “So I feel like this garden invites not only patients, but family members who are also making sense of all those changes in a person’s life.
“We’ve seen celebrations, too, babies being born and happy news.”
The gardens light the senses from musical art pieces to sweet-smelling flowers. It’s literally a place to stop and smell the flowers.
“Have you ever stopped to smell a flower and like, what comes to life inside us? Like our senses? And that’s what lights up within any of us when we take that moment,” Alsworth explained. “This garden allows our senses to come to life, which is part of healing. It’s part of life.”
The space where the garden is today used to be used by the Sisters of Providence when they first came to that hospital.
Sadowski says they were looking for a place to put the Healing Garden.
“This place called us, and by the end, we had so many green lights in its creation that we honestly started feeling like the nuns who had this garden here,” Sadowski said. “Years ago, wanted a garden again, wanted things to grow and to produce. And maybe this is like a spiritual production instead of a vegetable production.
“But we did, at the end, feel like we had help. At a big level.”
Sadowski also thanked the donations to the Providence Foundation for making the creation of the garden possible.
“The Healing Garden for me is a place that I come, when I just need to be still. And sometimes in a world that’s very busy, in a hospital where we have extreme highs, we also find ourselves faced with many challenges, it’s a space where I can come and it just settles my spirit. And it’s a place where I come and reflection and prayer,” Alsworth said.
“This garden has a lot of energy and memories and love in it,” Sadowski said.
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