According to research by the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield, gardening two or three times a week has direct positive effects on wellbeing and was shown to lower stress.

For formerly incarcerated women who deal with trauma and depression, gardening jobs provide stability and healing, making them less likely to reoffend A person's relapse into criminal offenses is referred to as recidivism. About 6 in 10 (62%) prisoners released across 34 states in 2012 were arrested within 3 years, and 7 in 10 (71%) were arrested within 5 years..

Rachel Kelly is a bestselling writer and mental health advocate, whose books detail her experience of depression. She has also written about gardening as a tool for recovery.

In an interview, she said that the garden “reflected an emotional reality for me that equally, after the darkness, there could come hope again. I could mirror my own emotions in the cycle of the seasons. So I think that's really how gardening particularly helped me in my own trauma. In a physical way, it helped me because it meant that I was outside. I was getting sunshine, vitamin D. I was getting exercise. I was getting my hands dirty.”

Kelly added that her return to nature was a big part of her path to mental wellness.


IN Conversation with the Insight Gardening Program Team

At Insight Gardening Program, Andrew Winn serves as the Executive Director and Joshua Gunner Johnson is a Reentry Manager. They have both previously worked with Project Rebound, a program that helps formerly incarcerated students to apply to and graduate with a degree from Sacramento State. The two recently made the move to the Program and now facilitate vocational gardening and landscaping training.


Robert Ortiz Archila is the Southern California Reentry Coordinator for the Insight Gardening Program. Founded in 2002, the Program is a nonprofit gardening and landscaping training project for people in prison and coming out of prison. Archila works with Tubbs and Richardson as a facilitator, building networks within the reentry community.

He said that they use the gardening model to mimic how important it is to self-examine and cultivate people’s inner gardens. Within that model, Archila’s vision is “to have a collaborative effort across Southern California where everyone thinks about supporting people returning home.”

Archila, also a graduate student at California State University, is researching the intersectionality and resiliency among women coming out of prison who go back to school. In some of his work, he noted that a lot of women coming home from prison gravitate toward gardening, landscaping and urban farming.

“It gives them the flexibility to tend to their families, go to school and also be a part of the farmer's market and community gardens,” he said. “There are some jobs for master gardeners that are actually pretty well-paid but they do require knowledge about gardening and [reentry people] gain those skills through our programs.”

While there is a deficit of support programs specifically set up for women being released from prisons, Archila hopes that the future will bring reform that drives rehabilitation and provides better opportunities for them.

He said, “If there was an initiative that would allocate funds to provide that platform for women to start their own businesses and become growers, and to provide scholarships for women that want to go into that sector of the industry to become educated in that sector — I think that that would be very, very productive for the reentry journey for women coming home.”

The environment Huma House has cultivated appeals to a woman who has come a long way from the 18 years she spent in a small cell with seven others, and Richardson wants to share this new space with others.

“The soil doesn't discriminate. It doesn't care about color, race, class or gender,” Richardson said. “It's all about paying attention, doing the work and making things grow.”