Gardening improves physical health and produces nutritious homegrown goodies , but its therapeutic benefits extend beyond that. From relaxation and stress relief to formal therapist-directed programs, mental and emotional wellbeing get welcome boosts along the garden path. Gardening has a rich history in the United States , and its therapeutic benefits are part of that. In the late s, Dr.
Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician and Declaration of Independence signer, documented that garden settings and digging in gardens were significant factors in recovery for patients with mental illness. Nearly years later, the first U. Sensory-oriented, plant-dominated and packed with fragrance, color and texture, these gardens may be meant for passive enjoyment or active work.
Either way, visitors enjoy therapeutic benefits that include reduced stress and anxiety, and increased hope and happiness. Interacting with nature — even in the simple act of viewing trees or visiting garden-like settings — can have dramatic therapeutic results. Post-surgical hospital patients who viewed trees out their hospital windows have been shown to recover more quickly than similar patients who viewed walls.
Not only were hospital stays shortened, tree-viewing patients had fewer complications, took fewer painkillers and got fewer negative chart comments from attending staff. Merely seeing a garden from a balcony was shown to improve mood in both depressed and non-depressed elderly participants in one study. However, actually visiting the garden and walking or sitting in it did even more. Participants felt less depressed and reported improvements in mood, sleep quality and concentration, as well as greater peace of mind and hopefulness.
Like outdoor garden settings, viewing green plants in indoor living spaces can perk up your spirits and your sense of wellbeing. But the benefits of caring for a living plant, even a single houseplant, transcend green views. Studies show that caring for a plant has particular value for people facing challenging personal circumstances beyond their control that negatively affect physical and emotional health.
Some hospitals have been redesigned to incorporate gardens, spurred by findings that patients recovering from catastrophic injuries can heal more quickly if they have access to outdoor spaces with plants. Laboratory rats whose cages contain soil and logs are more energetic and sociable than those whose cages include a wheel, a ladder, and a tunnel. She draws on thirty years of clinical practice. Previously the lead psychotherapy clinician in the county of Hertfordshire, she now works for an affiliate of the British Medical Association which provides mental-health support to doctors.
But I was interested in the unconscious aspects of gardening—the symbolism, and the level of metaphor. As a child, Kay had experienced neglect and violence; as an adult, she often had conflicts with her two adolescent sons, whom she raised alone, in a flat with a small garden that the boys had destroyed with their antics. When her sons moved out, Kay reclaimed the garden. Gardening provided Kay a refuge and an engagement with the world beyond herself; it also gave her confirmation of her capacity to provide care and tenderness, in a less fraught context than that of her family relationships.
In making a case for the profound, if sometimes obscure, significance with which we imbue our gardens, Stuart-Smith draws especially on the work of the British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, who died in , at the age of seventy-four. Gardening can be especially helpful for people suffering from P. One war veteran there said that only in the company of trees did he feel safe enough to close his eyes. Gardening can also help heal a mind wounded by more ordinary forms of grief, such as bereavement.
Gardening provided a way of being alongside my mother, whom I could not visit, as she pottered, alone, in the space of my childhood. They were at home, in the garden, and behind them I could see a breeze-rippled sea of pink and purple blooms, backed by rounded green embankments of hedges and towering trees. Sue was doing her clinical work remotely, rather than in London. The Stuart-Smiths met in , as undergraduates at Cambridge University.
Sue was studying English, and would have gone on to do a Ph. The combination of her grief and her discovery of Freud , in a class covering morality and philosophy, helped her decide instead to become a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Tom, meanwhile, was studying zoology, but an adolescent fascination with gardening intensified at Cambridge. There, he got to know Geoffrey Jellicoe—one of the most distinguished gardeners of the twentieth century, whose practice drew on both Renaissance architecture and Jungian theory—and Lanning Roper, a witty American landscape designer known for combining structure with exuberance.
For the first time, Tom saw gardening as a professional option for himself. After graduating, he went to Manchester, to train as a landscape architect. Meanwhile, they read together the psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Winnicott, whose theories Sue was learning to put into practice. Two sons, Ben and Harry, followed. But the barn-renovation project had its tensions. He is celebrated for designs that are both sensuous and cerebral, combining man-made forms and structures—a clipped hedge, a grid of paths—with patterns created by wild nature.
At a private house on the Norfolk coast, an orchard-like space enclosed by tall hedges and wood fencing incorporates fringed staghorn sumac trees, which are underplanted with boxwood arranged to recapitulate the forms of detritus that washes up on a nearby beach. Working with a couple in North London who had a small child, Stuart-Smith transformed a two-thousand-square-foot back yard into a fantastical, stylized forest that looks like something out of Maurice Sendak , with half a dozen or so giant fern trees imported from Tasmania quivering amid grasses and lumpy mounds of boxwood.
The Barn garden is both a good-enough garden and an extraordinary one. In a landscape ceded to him by his parents, Tom has created a highly distinctive place of his own. The garden also expresses the mutuality of a long marriage in which enthusiasms have been exchanged. Over the years, Tom explained to me, his landscape designs have increasingly reflected ideas of attachment and separation; safe enclosures near the house gradually open to more untamed reaches beyond.
Or — dare I say it — would plastic plants trigger a similar response? Gardening is a classic example of such a mindfulness exercise, where you clear out extraneous thoughts and focus on what is in front of you, especially given the seasonal nature of gardening. In fact, many Eastern cultures that have a long tradition of mindfulness are fixated on the beauty of seasonal plants, such as cherry blossom, precisely because of their transience, not in spite of it.
So, in my opinion, fake plants and a green fence are unlikely to provide the full benefit. Indeed, studies conducted at community gardens found that gardening in such places has a significant positive impact on one of the key factors behind poor mental health — loneliness and isolation.
One easy way to do this is to put more time and energy into your front garden. I have found that gardening like this instantly starts more conversations with neighbours, though, for introverts like me, chatting with half a dozen strangers a day does not always come naturally even given the benefit of all the green plants.
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