Gwanak-gu grabs excellence award at 2026 Seoul Garden City Awards

Gwanak-gu's "Gwanak Healing Gardener" program won the excellence award in the garden city category at the 2026 Seoul Landscaping and Garden City Awards on Monday.

Now in its 14th year, the Seoul Garden City Award was established in 2013 to discover and promote outstanding examples of gardens created and consistently maintained through voluntary citizen participation in everyday spaces such as alleyways, leftover lots, front yards and parks.

The award carries added significance because it recognized not only the garden's aesthetic completeness but also residents' ideas, their participation process and their ongoing management efforts.

Gwanak Healing Gardener volunteers first took part in creating the Nakgok Saengsaeng Garden, then went on to maintain the garden landscape of the wind path forest in front of Nakseongdae Park, handling pruning and other upkeep. They earned particular praise for consistently joining garden volunteer activities such as "Green Day" and "Everyday Gardening," going beyond simple learning to help spread a resident-led garden culture.

"Gwanak Healing Gardener" is the district's flagship resident-participation garden management project, training neighborhood garden caretakers through education. It has grown beyond basic garden education into a resident-participation garden management model in which residents directly cultivate and manage gardens in their own neighborhoods.

Since launching its first class of garden training in 2025, the program has produced a total of 84 graduates through its third cohort. Starting in September, the district has been offering advanced training to graduates who completed the basic course, aiming to sharpen their expertise and cultivate "resident garden leaders" who can take the lead in local garden volunteer work.

Gwanak Healing Gardeners with specialized training take part in ongoing volunteer work to maintain parks and gardens near their homes, growing into neighborhood garden leaders who connect people with nature and drive the local green culture.

Going forward, the district plans to expand the scale of the Gwanak Healing Gardener program to cultivate more professional garden activists, and to spread a resident-led garden culture across Gwanak-gu in which residents tend gardens close to daily life and connect with their neighbors.

"This award is especially meaningful because it is the fruit of residents' efforts to directly cultivate gardens and build a garden culture together with their neighbors," said Gwanak-gu District Mayor Park Jun-hee. "We will continue to elevate 'Healing Garden City Gwanak,' where any resident can enjoy nature and leisure close to daily life, adding greater happiness to residents' lives."