this booklet - Pacific Oaks College

“Gardening is a metaphor for life, you learn so much about yourselfwhile nurturing and beautifying your world. Watering connects youdirectly with the earth; weeding eliminates material destructive to growth;planting generates new life and a plan for the future. ”BackgroundIn addition to her twins enrolled at the PO Children’s School, Phaedra’s passions are design, food, horticulture,child psychology, and entertaining. The latter includes many charity events, at her extraordinary, 1905Greene & Greene designed, Pasadena home. Her food styling, a work of art, is a feast for the eyes and soul!If we’ve lost the joys of peaceful gardens, Phaedra advocates “Nurture Through Nature” and is helping tobring back the joy with perhaps the “most opulent and eclectic private garden west of the Mississippi –almost all of it edible.” (Pasadena Weekly 7/1/09). In the 19th century, Dr. Benjamin Rush, considered the“father of American psychiatry” reported that garden settings held curative effects for people with mentalillness. Today this is an emerging practice.In addition to her PO degree, she has a Psy.D. in Clinical Child Psychology (2011) from The Riess DavisGraduate Center for Child Development and Psychotherapy, a BA from the University of Southern Californiain International Relations, and an AA from FIDM in Interior Design. She has California licenses in bothMarriage and Family Therapy and Interior Design and is a Registered Horticultural Therapist and MasterGardener. Phaedra speaks both Greek and Japanese fluently and studies French and Italian.Phaedra appeared on the NBC “Morning Show” when she procured a $250,000 grant to develop and directThe Children’s Horticultural Therapy Center at Descanso Gardens. She established a pilot mental healthagency in a garden setting and a multidisciplinary clinical training site for mental health professionals andvolunteers to work with special needs students in the Los Angeles and Pasadena Unified School District.She was on the adjunct faculty at UCLA in the Landscape Architecture Department, and has also taughtadult cooking classes at Descanso Gardens, the Los Angeles County Fair and the Los Angeles Arboretum.She has lectured at numerous conferences on Horticultural Therapy in the U.S. and Canada. As a foodphotography stylist, her work has been featured in Food and Wine and Wynn Resort Magazines.Independent Learning or Thesis ProjectMA: “Nurture Through Nature” (1999) available at Pacific Oaks Library. Psy.D.: “Parental Disclosureof Birth History in Gestational Surrogacy: Co-constructing a Developmentally-based Birth Narrative inFemale Children” (2011). Available at the Riess-Davis LibrarySpeaking and/or Consulting TopicsNurture Through Nature; Horticultural Therapy Utilizing Psychoanalytic Principles; Archetypal Spaces;Horticultural Therapy Pilot Program at Descanso Gardens; Gestational Surrogacy; Restoration of TheRobinson House, a Green & Green TreasureContactPhone: (h) 626-792-1400Email: Phaedra@phaedra.bizWeb Site: www.phaedra.biz37