A life-affirming study of the pleasures of tending a plot or garden, and soothing your mind
Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has a unique view of gardening: “I have come to understand that deep existential processes can be involved in creating and caring for a garden.” For her, a garden – such as her own at Serge Hill, Hertfordshire – is far more than just a much loved physical space. It is also a mental space, one that “gives you quiet, so you can hear your thoughts”. When you work with your hands in the garden, weeding or clipping, you free your mind to work through feelings and problems.. By tending your plants, you are also gardening your inner space and, over time, a garden is woven into your sense of identity, becoming a place to “buffer us when the going gets tough”.
It was Wordsworth who said that to walk through a garden is to be “in the midst of the realities of things”, to be immersed in the primal awareness not just of nature’s beauty, but the eternal cycle of the seasons, of life, death and rebirth. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed modern technological life had alienated us from the “dark maternal, earthy ground of our being”. He grew his own vegetables and argued that “every human should have a plot of land so that their instincts can come to life again”.
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