The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith
In the Sunday Times’ bestseller, The Well Gardened Mind, the prominent psychiatrist, psychotherapist and keen gardener, Sue Stuart-Smith, describes why therapeutic horticulture and more generally, gardening and being in nature, have a soothing effect on most individuals. She does this by drawing on her personal experience, interviews with therapists and individuals helped by gardening, together with published literature. She describes how gardening and being in nature can be particularly helpful when recovering from trauma (including grief and mental illness) and as a means of recovery from the stress of urban life. Gardening also speaks to individuals at the end of life as a preparation for death.
Stuart-Smith explains that a garden or nature achieves this through our inborn relationship with plants and the natural world, and our appreciation of their beauty. In addition, specific attributes of a garden speak to us. These include the feeling of enclosure in a safe space; appreciation of the cycles of life by watching and nurturing plants from germination through to death and rebirth as the next generation; the ongoing creativity of making and caring for a garden; and the physical experience of working with the soil, roots and shoots. Also, by being both an expression of nature and of the gardener’s mind, a garden represents both the inner and the outer world. Hence a garden can be a place of ritual, whether culturally defined or just for the individual.
Gardens can provide a feeling of security that allows healing and the forming of new bonds. Particularly in a walled garden, there is a feeling of being in an enclosed safe space. The feeling of safety frees the mind from physical cares to consider the inner world. The activity of gardening also provides a means of interacting with the physical world in a way that feels safe, compared with the dynamic interactions with other individuals. Watching nature’s response to the gardener’s actions provides a feeling of empowerment. Because this is the product of both the human mind and nature, it can be felt as a partnership without full control or powerlessness on either side.
Just as gardening gives neither a feeling of full control nor complete helplessness, plants can embody opposing feelings, thus encompassing a wide spectrum of human emotions. Trees can be a symbol of strength, protection and endurance, while seedlings engender feelings of nurture.
Plants also provide metaphors that we use to help understand our human condition. Roots provide a metaphor for our inner world, hidden from sight but on which our strength and perseverance depend. Flowers can symbolize the beautiful but ephemeral nature of life. And gardens, as a space between the natural and human-created world, can be a threshold space between life and death, providing comfort towards the end of life. Gardening and observing nature also provide a refreshing cyclical sense of time based on the rhythm of growth and decay. This contrasts with the linear, goal-directed sense of time that pervades much of modern life.
Gardens and gardening can take many forms and have done so from the earliest days of civilization to modern day and throughout the world. The nature of gardens and their purported function in society have differed over time and between cultures, but they have always been valued. As explained in this book, gardens and gardening are as important to individuals and society today as in the past. They should continue to be nurtured to benefit all society.