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...

“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 hol...

... 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 th...

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.

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 ...

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 pris...

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...