Who We Serve
With more than 30 years of experience in horticulture, education, research, and landscape design, founder Andrea Clark, M.Ed., has built her career around understanding plants and the ways people interact with them. That experience shapes Terra Sano’s approach to schools, healthcare and senior care settings, workplaces, communities, and residential spaces.
Through therapeutic horticulture and sensory design, planted spaces can become active parts of everyday life. They can invite hands-on interaction, engage the senses, encourage movement and learning, and create opportunities for restoration, participation, and connection.
Different environments have different needs. Our approach considers the people who use each space and how plants can become an active part of their experience.
The Six Pillars of Terra Sano
Education & Youth Settings
School environments can be busy, stimulating spaces, particularly for children navigating ADHD, autism, or sensory processing differences. Traditional playgrounds and schoolyards often provide few opportunities to step away from noise, movement, and competing sensory input.
Thoughtfully designed green spaces can offer an alternative. Drawing from principles such as Attention Restoration Theory, sensory planting, and nature-based learning, Terra Sano creates outdoor environments that encourage curiosity, hands-on engagement, movement, and opportunities for quieter sensory experiences.
Gardens can also incorporate purposeful activities such as planting, watering, digging, carrying, and tending—giving students opportunities to engage their senses and bodies while developing responsibility, observation skills, and connections with the natural world.
For neuro-inclusive environments, design may include low-stimulation garden areas, defined pathways, sensory planting, quiet reading or reflection spaces, and clear spatial boundaries that give students different ways to participate based on their individual needs.
Terra Sano approaches educational landscapes as more than playgrounds. They can become outdoor classrooms, sensory spaces, and living environments for exploration, learning, and connection.
Recovery & Clinical
Recovery and behavioral health environments serve people who may be experiencing heightened stress, anxiety, cravings, or difficulty with emotional regulation. Therapeutic horticulture can provide opportunities for purposeful activity, sensory engagement, and grounding within the structure of treatment and recovery.
Gardening activities such as turning soil, planting, watering, pruning, and harvesting engage the body and senses while directing attention toward a tangible task in the present moment. Quieter garden areas can provide space for reflection, conversation, or individual therapeutic activities. Together, these experiences allow planted environments to complement existing recovery and behavioral health programming.
Design can include distinct active and passive zones, separating hands-on horticultural activities from quieter spaces for reflection or counseling. In secure treatment settings, plant selection and layout can also consider visibility, circulation, boundaries, and physical safety, while still creating an environment that feels natural and welcoming.
Terra Sano approaches clinical and recovery gardens as supportive spaces within a broader care program, creating opportunities for grounding, participation, reflection, and rebuilding connections with daily routines and the natural world.
Commercial & Corporate
Workplaces often require long periods of focused screen time, repetitive tasks, and sustained attention, which can contribute to mental fatigue and reduced opportunities to step away and reset. Biophilic design introduces plants and natural elements into the workplace to create spaces that feel more restorative and provide employees with regular contact with nature throughout the day.
Interior planting can be incorporated into breakrooms, meeting areas, shared workspaces, and hospitality settings. Greenery adds natural texture and visual variation to spaces that are often dominated by screens and hard architectural surfaces. Sensory elements such as fragrant herbs, subtle plant movement, and natural sounds can also provide simple opportunities for interaction during the workday.
Design strategies may include integrated planters, sensory planting, water features, and accessible aromatic herbs placed where employees naturally gather, pause, or meet. These elements can help transform common areas into spaces that encourage brief moments of restoration and sensory engagement.
Terra Sano creates commercial and corporate environments that bring nature into everyday routines, giving employees, guests, and visitors opportunities to pause, interact, and reconnect with the natural world.
Senior Living & Memory Care
For older adults experiencing Alzheimer’s, dementia, or other forms of cognitive decline, the design of an outdoor space can influence how comfortably and confidently they interact with their surroundings. Therapeutic gardens can provide familiar sensory experiences, opportunities for gentle movement, and meaningful ways to engage with plants and nature.
Reminiscence Therapy can play an important role in these environments. Familiar scents, textures, and plants may help evoke long-term memories and encourage conversation or recognition. Heirloom roses, fragrant herbs, familiar flowers, and the tactile experience of working with soil can create sensory connections to earlier experiences and personal histories.
Memory care gardens can also be designed with accessibility and navigation in mind. Continuous-loop pathways provide residents with a clear route through the garden without confusing dead ends. Accessible raised planters can accommodate wheelchairs and walkers, allowing residents to participate in planting, tending, and other garden activities more comfortably.
Terra Sano designs these spaces to encourage sensory engagement, movement, memory, familiarity, and continued participation in the natural world.
Community & Residential
Homes and community spaces offer some of the most personal opportunities to build meaningful relationships with plants and the natural world. Therapeutic horticulture and sensory design can turn everyday outdoor spaces into places for relaxation, gathering, hands-on activity, and regular interaction with nature.
Gardens can be designed around the people who use them, incorporating fragrant and tactile plants, comfortable gathering areas, accessible planting spaces, wildlife-friendly species, and opportunities for seasonal gardening activities. In residential settings, this may mean creating a quiet sensory retreat or a garden that becomes part of a family's daily routine. In shared community spaces, planting can encourage participation, conversation, and a greater sense of connection to place.
Thoughtful layouts can also provide different ways to experience the garden, from actively planting and tending to simply sitting among plants, observing wildlife, or enjoying changing colors, textures, and scents throughout the seasons.
Terra Sano creates community and residential spaces that make nature a more intentional part of everyday life, giving people a place to gather, participate, slow down, and spend time outdoors.
Hospitality & Wellness
Hospitality and wellness spaces are designed around how people feel and experience their surroundings. Thoughtful planting and sensory design can help create environments that invite guests to slow down, engage with nature, and find moments of restoration throughout their visit.
Hotels, restaurants, resorts, spas, wellness centers, and retreat spaces can incorporate fragrant and tactile plants, calming garden areas, biophilic elements, seasonal planting, and spaces for quiet interaction with nature. These features can become part of the guest experience, whether through an immersive garden, a planted courtyard, a spa setting, or smaller sensory moments integrated throughout the property.
Plant selection and layout can also reflect the identity of a property, its climate, and the experience it wants to create for guests. This allows the landscape to feel connected to the setting rather than simply decorative.
Terra Sano works with hospitality and wellness spaces to create planted environments that contribute to a welcoming, restorative guest experience and encourage meaningful interaction with the natural world.
Your space has its own purpose. Let’s design around it.
Every setting comes with different people, priorities, and possibilities. Terra Sano™ works with clients to develop planted spaces that reflect how they will actually be experienced and used.