Public Spaces Meant to Heal

COMMUNITY gardens have been around for decades, but open spaces without locked gates are not so common, especially in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Nevertheless, Tom and Kitty Stoner, who run the TKF Foundation, believe it is that very openness that engenders peace and healing.

The foundation, which is named after its founders (T and K for Tom and Kitty, and F for "firesoul," their word for those who create the garden and keep the fires burning), has helped pay for more than 120 public spaces in the mid-Atlantic region since the Stoners started it 12 years ago. "Open Spaces, Sacred Places," a book published this month by their Annapolis-based foundation, and written by Mr. Stoner and Carolyn Rapp, recounts the stories of a dozen of those places.

They include healing gardens in hospitals; teaching gardens and a community-built arboretum; a garden planted by inmates at a prison in western Maryland; a columbarium, or place to store ashes after cremation, for the poor in a garden in Falls Church, Va.; and a tree-planting project at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, modeled after Joseph Beuys's "7,000 Oaks" in Kassel, German

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/garden/16garden.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&oref=slogin