I first wrote this blog post for World Mental Health Day in 2019, around the start of my change in career to gardening. This coming week is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I’m sure I will see the usual wealth of material floating around on social media, extolling the benefits of gardening for improving health and wellbeing. Even three years later, I still hold firm to everything I wrote back then, but perhaps with the addition of a little jog, once or twice a week, if energy levels and physical fitness permit...
Over the last few years, a number of people, on hearing that I’d made quite a radical career change have asked if I’d always wanted to become a gardener. The honest answer to that question is, ‘No’. My main reason for taking up and pursuing gardening is that it offers me everything I need to keep happy and healthy; fresh air, exercise, better control over the amount of work I do, and flexibility over when I do it; opportunities to keep learning, pay close attention to nature and the seasons, and to work both alone and with others.
When I was diagnosed with my first episode of depression in early 2017, a relative leant me Mark Williams’ and Danny Penman’s book ‘Mindfulness; A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World’. Mindfulness is a bit of a buzz word these days, but there is a growing body of research demonstrating the success of mindfulness techniques for treating depression.
However, aside from the fact that at the time, I was struggling to make sense of any printed material, I just couldn’t get the Williams and Penman approach to work for me. Eating raisins or cleaning my teeth in a mindful way just wasn’t doing it for me; I was too desperate to accelerate the evening routine so I could get into bed. I don’t think I managed to get past the second chapter.
Gardening, on the other hand, provides the best setting for completely engaging with every one of your senses. You can take your gloves off and feel the coolness of the soil; touch glossy leaves, velvety petals or mistakenly grasp a bramble; I love the smell of the garden after long awaited rain; lavender, roses, and I can never walk past my lemon balm without giving the foliage a rub and a sniff.
There are always sounds to check-in with, from birds, buzzing insects and chattering squirrels to passing traffic and even diggers and dumper-trucks, if it happens to be my volunteering day at RHS Bridgewater. My edible garden is still in its infancy, but I was pleased with the carrots this year, and am hoping that the new currant bushes will be sufficiently established to give me a good crop next year.
And once I’m out in the garden, there’s no restless scrolling through social media on my phone; I don’t even bother answering calls since I know that by the time I have wrestled off my gloves and found which pocket the phone is in, it will have gone to voicemail. This is exactly how it should be, and I now know that engaging all my senses with the garden is my own personal key to staying healthy.
