The Well Gardened Mind

Pick it up: If you like personal accounts about life in the garden, if you're looking for an insightful and engaging book about mental health, if you're curious about the effect of nature on our minds and bodies, if you're intrigued by the intersection of gardening and neuroscience. 

Sue Stuart Smith is a psychiatrist who took up gardening, fell in love with it, and began to see the tremendous healing power in the daily act of engaging with growing things. She says, in the beginning of the book, that she used to think of gardening as yet another chore to be done around the house, not unlike the washing and cleaning.

Then she married a professional garden designer and an avid gardener. His enthusiasm for the garden was infectious, and it made her rethink her position. Over time, she began to find that the more she worked in the garden, the more peaceful she felt. It helped her connect with herself in a way that she hadn’t anticipated.

She relates her experience as a gardener to her work as a psychiatrist, and writes about the potential of gardening to help people heal from depression, trauma and a host of other mental health issues.

She points out that gardening is an inherently hopeful act. When you plant a seed, a bulb, or a sapling that will eventually grow into a tree, you have to wait, and to hope that there will be a plant, there will be flowers, and that one day there will be a tree. There’s something about this planting and hopeful waiting, and the pleasure of seeing that hope rewarded by a blooming garden, that renews and sustains the spirit.

She emphasises that it is not just that you garden, but how you garden that makes a difference. Garden making through history has too often been about imposing our will on nature. Therapeutic gardening is necessarily about gardening sustainably, working with nature, and connecting with the cycle of life in which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal.

Sue Stuart Smith brings contemporary neuroscience, and psychoanalysis together with accounts of people struggling with stress, depression, trauma and addiction, changing their lives by getting involved with a garden. This is an optimistic and uplifting book that is a timely reminder in this age of rush and instant gratification, to slow down and connect with the rhythms of the natural world.