The slender leaves of a weeping willow cascade over children who ride tricycles, revel in the shade, and pretend the tree's branches are a car wash. Fragrant honeysuckle wafts through the air; wind chimes sway rhythmically. Robins hunt for lunch, and on this breezy day, Anabel, a 3-year-old visitor wearing a jacket sporting ladybugs and flowers, worries "the plants are starting to blow away."

No, this isn't a suburban backyard or even just a lovely hidden garden in the bowels of Manhattan. Instead, the award-winning Children's PlayGarden is one of four restorative gardens especially designed for people who visit or reside in New York University's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.

Built in the late 1950s, the Enid A. Haupt Glass Garden was designed to provide patients and their families with a lush refuge from a sometimes austere and impersonal hospital environment.

The Glass Garden is a public botanic garden classified in the same cultural category as a museum - where plants, rather than paintings, are collected and curated. It was also one of the first facilities in the United States to develop an extensive horticultural therapy program, in which patients are encouraged to care for and to propagate plants.

"It felt like I was liberated," says Amy Brook Sniderof the first time she entered the garden in her wheelchair. The former Rusk patient attended horticultural therapy five days a week, which "got me through one of the most difficult periods of my life. We were focusing not on what's wrong with us but on something positive that was a link to being outside."

Since the late 1980s, the popularity of gardens in hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and other institutions in the United States has grown dramatically. Judy Haselhorst, a consultant for Kurt Salmon Associates, which specializes in renovating healthcare facilities, has yet to run into an organization that has not requested light, water, plants, or gardens in their redesigns, she says.

While there are no exact statistics on the number of people practicing horticultural therapy, the field gained national recognition in 1973, when the American Horticultural Therapy Association was founded. It currently has 12 chapters and nearly 800 members.

It's not unusual for Nancy Chambers, director of the Glass Garden, to get several phone calls a week from people requesting that she "tell me all you know" about the therapeutic use of gardens.

Dressed in oversized shirts and tennis shoes, Ms. Chambers gladly helps others in the field. She also actively promotes the training classes offered at the Glass Garden for landscape architects and gardeners interested in designing therapeutic gardens.

Independent and strong-minded, Chambers stresses the importance of other groups not simply replicating her programs and gardens but tailoring them to fit their own needs. Chambers often pokes fun at the conservatory at Rusk's Glass Garden. She wouldn't be surprised to find an exact replica of "this ugly old greenhouse" in Japan somewhere, she says.

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