Horticulturally-induced stress & some solutions

Thank you so much for all your responses to my last email and my last blog post. I am still working through them all (I felt so itchily vulnerable that I had to not read any emails at all for twenty four hours).

Three words came up a lot. Overwhelm. Guilt. Bindweed.

There was a theme too, of judgement. Expected or perceived judgement by others, which I think , when it really comes down to it, it simply a judgement of oneself. I may one day write a slightly ranty polemic about how I think is because women are expected to tend, and ‘messy’ gardens, homes, spaces, hair, somehow reflect upon us as inadequate women, so when we see a garden that doesn’t conform to conventional standards of beauty. Sound familiar?

Being a clinical psychologist means training in many modalities. Most therapists learn one, and they believe in it, love it, and stick with it. What model you use in therapy is like your politics; you absolutely don’t want to raise this as a discussion at a dinner party. There will be spats.

And so I speak many languages. My love language is attachment. Cut me in half and it says ‘attachment theory’. There is a joke at work that any discussion about any case in any situation, and I will eventually say ‘well, of course, that’s all about attachment’. And you know what? I can talk about gardens as an expression of your attachment strategies. The messages you were given about yourself and others when you were little, formed your template for all relationships and that includes your relationship with a garden.

But I think we might work up to that. What I am trying to say is that every model I ever learned about in my unnecessarily large number of psychology degrees, I can find a way to apply to this weird thing that I seem to have stumbled upon, which is that how we feel about our gardens is not quite as straightforward as horticultural therapists and Instagram have led us to believe.

As much as I might want to launch into psychoanalytic triangles, I will start with an easy one, stress.

You may think stress is something bad happening. As I type this, my husband is out in the torrential rain, changing a wheel on Margot the Land Rover because she has a flat tyre again. He is working long days in Bristol hospital and needs the sensible car, and without Margot I am stuck, and I have many orders to take to the post office tomorrow. Bad things, flat tyres, are stressful. Obvious, yes?

Well sort of, by which I mean, politely, no.

Stress is not a product of something out there in the world. It is an equation we mentally do, out of which stress is the answer.

Perceived demands of a situation – perceived resources available = stress

Wandering around in my field at the start of a week off, creating a mental checklist of things to do and anticipating a week of sunshine in which to wrestle some overgrown areas back into shape, and start some new projects. No stressful at all.

Wandering around the same field when a photographer is arriving in half an hour’s time. Or my mother. Or when rain is forecast for a whole month and I have a million other things to do.

This is true of everything in life by the way, not just gardening.

And the solution is always the same too. We either have to reduce the demands (problem-focused coping), or bump up our perception of our resources (emotion-focused-coping).

I unconsciously built this in when I sat down to do the design with Kristy. The current kitchen garden is badly laid out and labour intensive. When she asked if I wanted the same again mapped over the new second back garden, I visibly blanched. Absolutely not. What I want are raised beds, with wide, inviting paths between them. Round the front, I want grass that can be mown quickly and easily, preferably by someone else (I don’t outsource many jobs, but using a lawnmower is one of them) but with some topiary in, because I am a snob and I couldn’t just have a lawn.

And the ultimate secret to reducing weeds in any area? No dig. But with landscape fabric. If you have a largish area full of weeds that you want to bring into more active cultivation and you can sense the back ache just looking at it, throw a massive piece of landscape fabric over it and then you can forget about it for a year, whilst nature takes its course.

Don’t fancy that? Mulch.

Still too much? Identify something you can outsource. For me, that’s mostly hedge trimming, because I’m not very good at it and there’s a lot of tedious clearing up to do afterwards. Not a good use of my time.

So my first tip in this series of reducing overwhelm in the garden is to think about reducing the perceived demands of things. Be creative about how you can reduce the jobs. My mother swears that she will never start anything from a packet of seeds again and she will only buy plugs (or she’ll get me to start the seeds for her; other people are a whole new essay). If this is right for you, then do it.

Next time, how to increase your perceived resources, and why we look at other people’s gardens with such a non-judgemental eye, and our own with such criticism.