The Well-Gardened Mind

Thanks to Sue Stuart-Smith and The Well Gardened Mind, we have the intellectual underpinning for our instinctive response. The author is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and keen gardener, who has spent years investigating why it is that gardening and nature are so good for our mental and physical health. To do this she mixes — sometimes without much preamble — neuroscience, physiology, psychoanalysis and personal anecdote.

This is a readable and blessedly comprehensible account which, considering the complexity of much of the subject matter, especially to do with the brain, is an impressive achievement. It contains, au fond, both a very personal and a universal narrative. The author’s grandfather was imprisoned by the Turks at Gallipoli, finally escaped and, after a horrendous 4,000-mile journey, arrived home, suffering from malnutrition.

One of her recurring themes is that for almost all our history, humans have been hunter-gatherers, foragers and, at least since the late Paleolithic era, gardeners, and this history has shaped how our brains and psyches function. Moreover, we early acquired an aesthetic sense in our garden-making, as Genesis 2:9 makes abundantly clear. To distract and cloud our brains endlessly, as we do, with a kaleidoscope of screen images, Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter bitterness is to risk jangled, restless unhappiness and, crucially, a lack of resilience. 

“In tending a plot and nurturing and caring for plants, we are constantly faced with disappearance and return. The natural cycles of growth and decay can help us understand and accept that mourning is part of the cycle of life, and that when we can’t mourn it is as if a perpetual winter takes hold of us.

THE SPECTATOR - Ursula Buchan From magazine issue: 30 May 2020

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A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offer an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think. Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans.