Horticultural therapy is at an early application stage in student mental health education in China. This study screened 20 academic papers from the CNKI database on applying horticultural therapy in domestic student mental health education. It systematically analyzed the types of participating students, forms of teaching implementation, course implementation periods, and methods of effect evaluation. The findings highlight the current application of horticultural therapy in student mental health education as follows: 75% of the participants are university students; the forms of teaching implementation include horticultural art, horticultural operations, and landscape (horticultural) experiences, which are presented in an intermixed phased course system in actual teaching; most researchers favor course durations ranging from 3 to 16 weeks; 16 different quantitative evaluation methods are used for assessing outcomes, but there is no uniform standard.