MADERA, Calif. – Healing comes in many forms, and Matthew Mayes believes that soil and sunlight can do wonders for a patient facing a serious diagnosis.
As a clinical research coordinator at Valley Children’s Healthcare, Mayes spends his time sifting through studies to find the new ways to help patients. He takes documents hundreds of pages long and distills them into digestible information for physicians, patients and families.
When he’s not at his desk, he’s probably getting his hands dirty in the result in one of those studies: a garden just outside the doors of Valley Children’s Hospital.
“Our mind is a powerful thing,” Mayes said. “If we can help instill in the kids here that you’re not just your diagnosis, you’re way more than that, then we’re doing something right.”
Mayes, a Tulare native who studied at UC Santa Barbara, returned to the Central Valley with a passion for sustainability and a belief in the healing power of nature. That belief grew into a program he helped launch called “Roots of Resilience,” a therapeutic gardening initiative designed to support pediatric patients emotionally and psychologically.
“On the surface, it’s a very simple study where we garden with them,” Mayes said. “But it shifts the perspective from ‘I’m at the mercy of my condition’ to ‘let’s actually do something about it.’”
The program invites children to dig into the soil, plant seeds and watch their efforts blossom – literally. Mayes says the garden offers a sensory escape from the clinical environment, with children marveling at strawberries, cauliflower and much more.
“It’s a couple of steps away, but it’s a different world,” he said. “It’s indescribable, the effect it has on them.”
Incredibly, a flower that produces cancer-fighting compounds is growing in the garden right now. Compounds from the Madagascar periwinkle can be used in chemotherapy treatment; Mayes says once enough of the flowering plant has been grown, they’ll ship it off to be used to help patients inside the hospital.
In the garden, the message is simple: healing can begin with a single seed.
“They speak not with words, but with fragrance,” Mayes said of the plants. “And if you just look in the right spots, you’d be surprised how close healing really is.”
