Evaluation And Landscape Design Of Plants Based On Their Health Benefits In City Nursing Homes

The elderly population in China exceeded over 200 millions resently because of the rapidly aging rate,which is faster than that of European and American countries.Aging policies,facilities as well as environmental construction for old people are becoming more and more serious problems.Based on the physical,psychological characteristics and living needs of the elderly group,institutional nursing homes are playing more and more impotant role in serving the elderly groups than community home caring,especially for those lonely and elderly people who are disabled,having no family members,or children.Outdoor landscape design is closely related to human physical and mental health.A good plant landscape design of environment has significant benefits for improving and promoting the physical and mental health of the elderly.At present,healthy landscape concepts such as rehabilitation gardens have been gradually applied to the research of the outdoor environmental landscape design of nursing homes with many achievements.However,there are still some problems in current research including concept confusion,lack of quantitative research.Regarding to the outdoor environment landscape design in nursing homes,there is a specific lack of research which deeply correlates the plant landscape with the health characteristics and needs of the elderly,and there is a lack of unified evaluation model for the design and construction of health landscapes in nursing institutions.Under such situation,this article analyses and summarizes the health benefitial factors of plants in landscape design.By exploring the mechanism of plant landscape to the physical and mental health of the elderly,a plant landscape evaluation model and index system for nursing homes based on plant health benefits were constructed.Based on the evaluation,the plant landscape improvement of nursing homes was explored in practice.In this study,a nursing home for low-income families in Suzhou was used as an example to evaluate the indicators based on plant health benefits,and the outdoor plant landscape design strategy for Yin shanhu nursing home based on plant health benefits was proposed,the site was designed based on plant health benefits.The result of this research provides an important reference and practical guidance for the elderly in nursing homes to build a healthy and pleasant outdoor plant landscape environment.