We Believe Healing Belongs to Everyone.
The Planted Brain is a Los Angeles nonprofit bringing nature-based mental health care to communities that traditional systems have too often left behind.
Our Story
The Planted Brain was born from a simple, stubborn belief: that access to healing — real, culturally grounded, community-centered healing — should not depend on your zip code, your insurance card, or whether you’ve ever felt welcome in a traditional therapist’s office.
Our founder, David S. Washington, grew up with plants. Long before he became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, he understood that something happened to people in nature — a quieting, a grounding, a return to something that felt true.
Over 15 years working in behavioral health, he watched that truth get left out of clinical spaces that were sterile, transactional, and inaccessible to the communities that needed care most.
The Planted Brain was founded in 2023 to change that. To bring the garden into the healing space. To take the healing space out into the community. To build something rooted in the belief that Black and Brown communities, people experiencing homelessness, disaster survivors, and anyone who has ever been told that mental health care ‘isn’t for them’ — deserve a different kind of door.
“Where healing takes root”
How We Work
We use therapeutic horticulture — hands-on engagement with plants and the natural world — as a primary modality for mental health support. Not because it’s trendy. Because it works. Nature regulates the nervous system, reduces cortisol, builds community, and creates an entry point into healing for people who might never walk through a clinic door.
Everything we do is trauma-informed — meaning we understand that the people we serve have often experienced real harm at the hands of systems that were supposed to help them. We don’t replicate those systems. We build something different: slow, relational, grounded in trust, and designed to meet people exactly where they are.
We are also unapologetically culturally responsive. We know that healing looks different across communities, that ancestral relationships to land and nature are a source of strength — not just a therapeutic technique — and that the most effective care is care that honors the whole person and the community they come from.
Meet Our Founder
David S. Washington, MSW, LCSW
Founder & Director of The Planted Brain
David is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 15 years of behavioral health experience, including nearly nine years leading the clinical operations of a hospital-based intensive outpatient program at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. He is also a UC-Certified Master Gardener and holds a Certificate of Mastery in Therapeutic Horticulture from the North Carolina Botanical Garden through the American Horticultural Therapy Association.
But more than his credentials, David brings a lived understanding of what it means to find healing in the earth. His connection to plants and nature is personal, ancestral, and deeply woven into who he is as a clinician, a community member, and a human being. The Planted Brain is the organization he built to make that healing available to everyone.
CA LCSW #75915
Cert. of Mastery in TH — NCBG (AHTA)
UC-Certified Master Gardener
MSW, USC Dworak-Peck
Our Community Partners
We don’t do this work alone. The Planted Brain is built on relationships — with community organizations, healing practitioners, and the spaces that hold us. We are proud to partner with:
Jericho Road Pasadena
Serving Pasadena’s Northwest neighborhood through trauma support groups and our Horticulture for Healing workshop series.
Arlington Garden, Pasadena
Home to our Horticulture for Healing workshops — a premier public garden and a space we are honored to call a healing home.
If you are a community member looking for support, an organization interested in partnership, or someone who simply believes in this work — we would love to hear from you.