Why I garden
A garden is like any relationship, it demands attention and hard work to really flourish.
I love gardening for the close engagement and relationship it gives you with a particular place. There’s nothing quite like the physical immersion of it – although to be honest, I have more of a love/ hate relationship with that side of it.
The dirt under your fingernails, the twigs in your hair and the weight of the earth on your boots. The physical toil and labour of it, causing exhilaration and aching, in equal measure. But as well as being totally physically immersed, to garden well, you have to be mentally immersed.
It is a practice of close and constant observation, really looking in a critical way to honestly assess, what is working and what isn’t. What needs editing or attention, and then drawing on horticultural knowledge to correctly time interventions to bring out the best in a particular tree, shrub or perennial. It’s an ongoing process that doesn’t have an end point or a ‘final outcome’. As Penelope Lively writing on Life in the Garden says:
‘The gardener floats free of the present, and looks forward acquires expectations, carries next spring in the mind’s eye. And remembers, also, looks back, and considers then as compared with now, and next year. A gardener is able to see incipient promise everywhere.’
It is all consuming, and this immersion pushes worldly worries aside, so that you become entirely engrossed in the tasks at hand, present in the moment, the perfect mindfulness practice.
Leaf collecting in Church Cottage garden.
There has been some excellent writing recently about the positive affect of gardening on mental health. If you haven’t read it already, I’d highly recommend Sue Stuart-Smith’s book The Well Gardened Mind. Gardening can offer an important counterpoint to our increasingly screen-based culture and has so many positive benefits both physical and mental for everyone.
Not that my teenage children have taken that message on board at all, I hasten to add, but I live in hope that one day they’ll take it up and understand what their Mum was so obsessed by.