In recent years, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, irregular closed school life and frequent online teaching have negatively impacted the mental health and academic performance of many college students. Doing horticultural activities is an effective way to promote physical and mental health and enhance academic performance. This paper explores the relationship between horticultural activities participation, academic self-efficacy and positive mental characters under the perspective of disciplinary integration, with a view to promoting the mental health status and academic performance of college students and the application of horticultural therapy on college campuses. Questionnaires such as the Positive Mental Characters Scale for Chinese College Students (PMCS-CCS) and Academic Self-Efficacy Scale (ASES) are used to investigate 160 college students from four universities in China. The results show that horticultural activity participation is significantly positively correlated with academic self-efficacy (r = 0.345; p < 0.01) and positive mental characters (r = 0.298; p < 0.01), and horticultural activity participation can positively affect positive mental characters (B = 0.135, p < 0.01). At the same time, academic self-efficacy has a partial mediating effect between horticultural activity participation and positive mental characters. Universities can actively carry out campus horticultural activities to enhance students’ horticultural activity participation, which in turn promotes academic self-efficacy and further enhances the positive psychological level of college students.

“Soundscape” is defined as “an acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person or people, in context.” The research focuses on the physical properties of sound, paying attention to the relationship between the soundscape and people. Sports provide a comprehensive context, including the athletes, their behavior, the environment, spectators, and other elements. Soundscape in sports has many important functions, such as indicating the movement process, promoting positive emotions, and enhancing the entertainment atmosphere. It is also related to the physical and mental health of people who are exercising. As a technical sport with multidimensional soundscape qualities, diabolo is very popular among older adults in China due to its easy portability and operation. In order to explore the influence mechanism of the soundscape on the mental health of older players and better guide the shaping of soundscapes at sports venues, this paper focuses on soundscape perception and proposes a two-channel (direct and indirect) model of the influence of the diabolo soundscape on the psychological perception of older players. At the same time, we introduce the flow state as an indicator to evaluate mental health, and use the Short Flow State Scale (SFSS) to measure the flow state. By setting up a control experiment using the diabolo with and without sound and using the two-channel (direct and indirect) influence model to compare the differences in flow state scores under the two states, we analyzed the influence mechanism of the diabolo soundscape on the flow state of elderly groups. The results show that the scores of various flow state dimensions and total flow scores in the silent state of diabolo exercise are significantly lower than those in the sound state (p < 0.05 and p < 0.001), and the main differences are in the three dimensions of unambiguous feedback, sense of control, and autotelic experience. The two-channel influence model can effectively explain the differences in older adults’ flow state, which provides a new comprehensive perspective to study the effect of the soundscape in sports on people’s mental health.

The introduction of horticultural therapy to university campuses has gradually become an effective way to promote college students’ interaction with nature, improve their health and increase the quality of their study environment. However, many current studies have focused on measuring and evaluating the physical and mental health benefits of horticultural therapy programmes for college students, while less attention has been paid to exploring how to implement such programmes in a planned and sustainable manner. The main purpose of this study is to construct an evaluation system for the implementation of horticultural therapy programmes on university campuses, so as to better guide the sustainable development of campus horticultural therapy. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the Delphi method were combined in this study. Delphi method was used to carry out two rounds of consultation for 10 experts, to select and revise indicators at all levels and establish an evaluation system. Expert and college student opinions were combined to determine the weight of indicators at each level using AHP. The evaluation system constructed by Delphi method included 4 indicators in the criteria layer and 12 indicators in the indicator layer. The weight analysis of AHP showed that horticultural therapy plan (0.341) was most important in the criteria layer, followed by the natural healing environment (0.289), the horticultural therapy team (0.190) and post-maintenance management (0.180). In conclusion, the evaluation system constructed systematically sorts out the elements of conducting horticultural therapy programmes on Chinese university campuses, which has good application and promotion value.