Thinking about how and why gardens can be so helpful for wellbeing, I lifted down from my bookshelf a little book of quotes, "The Joy of Gardening" edited by Eileen Campbell (Headline, 2009). Flicking through its pages, some common threads started to dstand out: gardening as a mindful and joyful activity, a way to experience nature on the inside, and a feast for the senses. Would you echo them? A garden is without doubt many people's happy place. They like nothing better than to spend hours outside, sowing and planting, watering and tidying. For them, the garden is an island of calm, a haven, a refuge. I know some people who also have allotments, to have even more space to experiment.
In the book's introduction, the editor suggests that gardening helps wellbeing partly by developing in us particular qualities – such as attention, patience and trust. That's an interesting angle – gardening becomes character development! Not only training plants, but personalities too!
Yes, gardens encourage attention, that is, being attentive in the moment, noticing. The painter Georgia O Keeffe wrote about looking closely at a flower so that it becomes the world to you for a time. And as the poet Amy Lowell wrote: "Sunlight/Three marigolds/And a dusky, purple poppy-pod-/ Out of these I made a beautiful world."
For many people this mindfulness comes not only from looking at the garden's beauties but also from the sheer menial tasks themselves, pruning or clearing weeds to clear the mind as well.
Now that I've read about gardening fostering patience and trust, I agree. Planting bulbs requires patience, with a long cold winter ahead before any flowers emerge. And the garden designer Gertrude Jekyll wrote: "A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness."
Why should qualities like patience and trust and attentiveness help wellbeing? Think about their opposites. Impatience fuels frustration. Lack of trust can lead to lack of purpose. And struggling to concentrate and attend shuts out what is all around.
Here's another quote about gardens, going a step further, by the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson: "All my hurts my garden spade can heal." Do you agree with that one? I'm doubtful about the word "heal" here – but "soothe", yes.
Gardening can also ease restlessness and develop contentment. I loved this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince (which I've never read): "'Men,' said the Little Prince, 'set out on their way in express trains, but they do not know what they are looking for. Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round. And,' he added, 'it's not worth the trouble...what they are looking for could be found in a single rose.'"
I enjoy gardening – it's elemental, practical, productive. Ilike following the cycle of the year as it unfolds. I also like drawing and painting what grows and lives in gardens, and it's doing that I most focus on nature. For the month of June I'm running a daily art for wellbeing challenge called A Secret Garden – to sign up go to
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-secret-garden-tickets-629287163847
The challenge's title refers to art and to gardens as a haven apart. But it's also a nod to the classic story The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which celebrates how gardens can restore us, as we in turn restore them.
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