Gardening, happiness & the issue of mental health

The first post in a new category. This one a little more interesting, maybe, than my usual ‘how to’s’ or ‘seasonal jobs’, but one that is more in alignment with why I started Gather all those years ago.

I always knew I didn’t want to just write about facts and techniques, plant lists and bulb lasagne demonstrations. If you want to know, both google and Sarah Raven will put much of what you need to know in an easily accessible form.

Gather was about something else. What I felt when I discovered and binge-read (that wasn’t a thing in 2016, but in hindsight, it is exactly what I did) Miss Pickering’s blog. Something about escapism. Something about connection and joy.

But, I hear you ask, isn’t gardening all about happiness. Don’t you step outside for a minute, and find yourself still there, five hours later? My friend, my dirty little secret is no, I don’t.

On Monday, I heard Sue Stuart-Smith speak at Tuppenny Barn. She said lots of incredibly insightful things, plus one or two things I didn’t agree with. The idea that gardening is not an activity but a relationship made me think quite hard, but the more I thought, the more I came to the conclusion that it is a relationship with something that isn’t really a thing, but a projected perception of one’s own mind.

I mean, that’s a ridiculous thing to say, because everything is a projected perception of one’s own mind. Our brain screens out huge amounts of information, processes little bits of it, and weaves great big stories about the tiny bits that we let in. There are very few cold hard facts swirling around in our internal world, it’s all neurons fizzing and flashing and trying to make sense of things. Me? I can weave a whole story about the fact that my hedge germander has bits of bindweed in it.

Which brings me to something else Sue Stuart-Smith said. She was talking about growing flower gardens in prisons, and how people struggled with this, as if beauty was reserved for the morally pure, and criminals deserved only the utilitarian ranks of vegetables. She recalled talking to a woman in prison who spoke about the therapeutic value of flowering shrubs, and how she had never felt judged by a flower.

I may have gasped at this point, or at least mentally took a sharp intake of breath. I feel judged by flowers all the time.

It starts early on in their life; there are few things I find so soul-crushingly disappointing than a blank seed tray. Seeds are designed, intricately and exquisitely, to grow. If I can’t get them to germinate, I must have done something terribly wrong. Something everyone else seems to be able to do, effortlessly and easily.

Once in growth, I take damping off as a personal criticism, and berate myself for not washing my pots, using the wrong compost, or watering too enthusiastically. If things wilt and shrivel, I feel as much guilt as if I had kicked a kitten. I simply cannot be trusted, I tell myself, to be in charge of such vulnerable, tiny living things.

You get the gist.

However, there are enough people who experience gardening differently, who effortlessly experience joy just from being outdoors. Sue cited all sorts of clever research about the stress hormone, cortisol, reducing just twenty minutes after walking out into a green space. (Do these people not have ground elder, or slugs? Ok, ok, I’ll stop now.)

So, it isn’t the garden itself. It’s me. Or it’s late stage capitalism. Or endless dissatisfaction brought on by having conditional parents who pegged my value as a person to my achievement and attainment. Maybe I was born ambitious, with eyes bigger than my tummy, with a personality predisposed to striving. Or maybe it’s spending too much time on Instagram and subscribing to House and Garden and it’s plain comparisonitis.

Maybe it’s all of these things. Or maybe none of them, and the why doesn’t actually matter.

So I have called this category ‘growing happiness’. It’s always been the unofficial tagline for Gather. I’ve used it sometimes, and sometimes not. But this is where I need to go next with Malus Farm. There might need to be fewer blog posts about seasonal jobs lists and more about pleasure. Less worrying about the cables of brambles that are creeping into the garden from every boundary hedge, and more dreaming of bramble jelly.

As with all effective psychotherapy, the first stage is awareness. To catch myself looking out of my kitchen windows and seeing, not the cosmos that is looking so wonderful, but the apple espalier than needs pruning. On my morning round of the orchard, to notice the pull to see the slug eaten windfalls on the ground and mourn their waste, and look up into the tree and pick an ‘Orleans Reinette’ for breakfast.

‘Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.’

- Charles Dickens

This blog post is a tentative move into some themes that I have been wondering about for a while, and which I have long suspected may one day be a book. (You’ll know I have really let go of my striving ambitiousness if I choose not to write a book. This is very different to wanting to write a book and never getting round to it…)

‘Gardening for the high functioning over-achievers.’

‘Horticultural therapy for the stressed and rather sensitive.’

Something like that.

I spoke to someone at Tuppenny Barn who has worked in all sorts of horticulture, and now works at a very famous garden. We talked about this and she said she recognised both the very stressed sort of overwhelm that characterises a relationship with a growing space, but also said that she had spent the last sunny weekend of the late summer reading a book in a deckchair and blissfully ignoring the weeding. On the edge of my seat for the secret, I asked her what had changed.

I got a much smaller garden, she said.