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Sue Stuart-Smith

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The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature Kindle Edition

by Sue Stuart-Smith (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 919 ratings

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One of Garden & Gun’s Favorite Books of 2020

A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers 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, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. 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 and yet we understand so little about it. 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. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A psychiatrist and gardening devotee explores the mental health benefits that come with tending a plot. Something we can all use right now.”
—People

“Sue Stuart-Smith seeks to go beyond the truism that getting out in the garden is good for you.”
—The New Yorker

"How reassuring . . . to read Sue Stuart-Smith, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, extolling the impact of nature and gardens on mental health and spiritual recovery.”
—Wall Street Journal

“Examines how being disconnected from nature has negatively affected our mental health and how gardening can help to reconnect to nature . . . passionate and thoughtful.”
—Medium

"A beautifully articulated argument for the benefits of gardens and gardening—and nature in general—on physical and mental health.”
—AARP

“[Stuart-Smith] delivers a thoroughly researched text based on her deep and wide reading about the history of gardening, her visits to many of the therapeutic garden sites she mentions, and her interviews with many people, professionals and patients alike...Full of surprise and wonder.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review

“Fascinating… Sue Stuart-Smith renders a very special service with this book. Let’s hope it reaches not only the converted but those who need it most.”
—The Observer (UK)

“This is a life-affirming study of the special pleasures of tending your garden and growing things…[Stuart-Smith’s] heartfelt arguments for the benefits of nature and gardening for our mental health are informed by research in neuroscience and the evidence of patients who have improved through therapeutic gardening.”
—The Guardian (UK)

“Wise, insightful, and eloquent, Stuart-Smith’s soulful and sensitive treatise on horticulture’s healing properties is a well-positioned book for the current age of anxiety, offering a personally relevant perspective on how to cope in troubled times.”
—Booklist

“[Stuart-Smith] offers science-backed insight into the healing effects of nature…a joyful, peace-giving read.”
—Woman’s World magazine

“This is a book so wise and comfortable that it merits a place alongside Christopher Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden by the side of every bed…[Stuart-Smith’s] deep understanding of the human psyche makes this a perfect source text as well as an engrossing read.”
—Illustrated Garden magazine

“Atruly uplifting book on the power of gardening – and how it can change people’s lives.”
—Stylist (UK)

“The most original gardening book ever....Combines observation, horticulture, literature and history…it is a book that builds, chapter by chapter….as a reference and an inspiration…there is much here to feed the soul.” —Sunday Times (UK)

“In this gentle and wise book, Sue Stuart-Smith explores the vigorous relationship between the land and mental health, demonstrating the many occasions and ways that gardening can strengthen our inner vitality. In examining working of the land as a psychodynamic process, she exposes deep truths about the interconnectedness of the mind, the body, and what lies outside ourselves, and she does so with a winning mix of verve and generosity.”
—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree

“A compelling and deeply moving account of how profoundly our wellbeing can be affected through contact with gardening and the natural world. This is a timely call of return. Read it.”
—Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“This is an important and timely book. Mental health is a growing concern and yet is the least developed, least understood and least well-resourced aspect of medicine. Sue Stuart-Smith’s book is beautifully written, drawing on a lifetime’s experience as both as a clinician and a gardener, and I urge everyone to read it.”
—Monty Don of the BBC’s “Gardeners’ World”

“Fascinating in its content, lyrical, moving and elegantly written, The Well Gardened Mind explores and celebrates the very real connection we humans feel with plants and by extension, our gardens.”
—Rachel de Thame of the BBC’s “Gardeners’ World”

“Riveting, inspiring and often very moving, Sue Stuart-Smith's journey into the therapy of gardening reveals just how deep our connection with nature is, how much we risk when we cut ourselves off from it, and how much we can gain from its restorative power. A lively, compassionate exhortation for us all to get our hands back in the soil.”
—Isabella Tree, author of Wilding

“The wisest book I’ve read in many years. You don’t have to be a gardener or own a garden to take immense solace and pleasure from this remarkable book. Dr. Stuart-Smith doesn’t presume to make absurd and extravagant claims, but everything she says about the mind (and I’ve learned so much in the way of the history of psychiatry and psychology, as well as practical tips for both mind and garden) has the ring of authenticity and truth. Hugely recommended.”
—Stephen Fry

About the Author

Sue Stuart-Smith, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, took her degree in English literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She worked in the National Health Service for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at The Tavistock Clinic in London and is consultant to the DocHealth service. She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1 Beginnings

Sue and Tom with baby Rose, planting the first hedges in the courtyard at the Barn, 1988.

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

Long before I wanted to be a psychiatrist, long before I had any inkling that gardening might play an important role in my life, I remember hearing the story of how my grandfather was restored after the First World War.

He was born Alfred Edward May, but was always known as Ted. Little more than a boy when he joined the Royal Navy, he trained as a Marconi wireless operator and entered the submarine service. In the spring of 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, the submarine he was serving on ran aground in the Dardanelles. Most of the crew survived, only to be taken prisoner. Ted kept a tiny diary in which he documented the early months of his captivity in Turkey, but his subsequent time in a series of brutal labor camps is not recorded. The last of these was a cement factory on the shores of the Sea of Marmara from which he eventually escaped by sea in 1918.

Ted was rescued and treated on board a British hospital ship, where he recovered just enough strength to attempt the long journey home overland. Eager to be reunited with his fiancée, Fanny, whom he had left behind as a fit young man, he turned up on her doorstep in a battered old raincoat with a Turkish fez on his head. He was barely recognizable, weighing, as he did, little more than eighty pounds and having lost all his hair. The four-thousand-mile journey had, he told Fanny, been “horrendous.” On top of everything else he had endured during the preceding years, that journey took a severe toll on his health. When he underwent the naval medical examination, his malnutrition was found to be so advanced that he was given little more than a few months to live.

But Fanny nursed him faithfully by feeding him tiny amounts of soup and other sustenance on an hourly basis, so that gradually he was able to digest food again. Ted began the slow process of regaining his health, and he and Fanny were married soon after. In that first year, he would sit for hours stroking his bald head with two soft brushes, willing his hair to grow back. When it finally did, it was prolific, but it was white.

Love and patient determination enabled Ted to defy the gloomy prognosis he had been given, but his POW camp experiences stayed with him and his terrors were worst at night. He was especially afraid of spiders and crabs because they had crawled all over the prisoners as they tried to sleep. For years to come, he couldn’t stand being alone in the dark.

The next phase of Ted’s recovery began in 1920, when he signed up for a yearlong course in horticulture, one of many initiatives set up in the postwar years with the aim of rehabilitating ex-servicemen who had been damaged by the conflict. After this, he traveled to Canada in search of a new life and in the hope that working the land might further improve his physical and mental strength. At that time the Canadian government was running programs to encourage ex-servicemen to migrate, and thousands of men who had returned from the war made that long Atlantic crossing.

Ted labored on the wheat harvest in Winnipeg and then found more settled employment as a gardener on a cattle ranch in Alberta. Fanny joined him for some of the two years he spent there, but for whatever reason their dream of starting a new life in Canada did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, Ted returned to England a stronger, fitter man.

A few years later he and Fanny bought a smallholding with an orchard in Hampshire. In his spare time, he kept pigs, bees, and hens as well as growing flowers, fruit, and vegetables. For five years during the Second World War he worked at The Admiralty wireless station in London, and my mother remembers his pigskin suitcase which traveled up with him on the train, packed full of home-slaughtered meat and home-grown vegetables. He and the suitcase used to return carrying supplies of sugar, butter, and tea. She relates with some pride how the family never ate margarine during the war and that Ted even grew his own tobacco.

I remember his good humor and the warmth of his spirit, a warmth that emanated from a man who seemed to my childish eyes to be robust and at ease with himself. He wasn’t intimidating and he didn’t wear his traumas on his sleeve. He spent hours tending his garden and his greenhouse and was almost always attached to a pipe, with his tobacco pouch never far away. Ted’s long and healthy life—he lived into his late seventies, and his reconciliation to some of the appalling abuses he experienced—is attributed in our family mythology to the restorative effects of gardening and working the land.

Ted died suddenly in his late seventies, when I was twelve, from an aneurysm that ruptured while he was out walking with his much loved Shetland sheepdog. The local paper ran an obituary entitled “Once youngest submariner dies.” It reveals that he was reported dead twice during the war and that when he escaped with a group of captive soldiers from the cement factory, they lived for twenty-three days on water alone. The closing words document his love of gardening: “He devoted much of his leisure time to the cultivation of his extensive garden, and achieved fame locally as the grower of several rare orchids.”

Somewhere inside her, my mother must have drawn on this when my father’s death, in his late forties, left her a relatively young widow. In the second spring afterward, she found a new home and took on the task of restoring the neglected cottage garden. Even then, in my youthful, self-preoccupied state, I noticed that alongside the digging and the weeding, a parallel process of reconciling herself to her loss was taking place.

At that stage of my life, gardening was not something I thought I would ever devote much time to. I was interested in the world of literature and was intent on embracing the life of the mind. As far as I was concerned, gardening was a form of outdoor housework, and I would no more have plucked a weed than baked a scone or washed the curtains.

My father had been in and out of the hospital during my university years, and he died just as I started my final year. The news came by phone one morning at around 5 a.m., and as soon as dawn broke I walked out through the quiet Cambridge streets into the park and down to the river. It was a bright, sunny October day, and the world was green and still. The trees and the grass and the water were somehow consoling, and in those peaceful surroundings, I found it possible to acknowledge to myself the awful reality, that beautiful as the day was, my father was no longer alive to see it.

Perhaps this green and watery place reminded me of happier times and of the landscape that had first made an impression on me as a child? My father kept a boat on the river Thames, and when my brother and I were small, we spent many weekends and holidays on the water, once making an expedition up to the river’s source, or as near to it as we could get. I remember the stillness of the early morning mists and the feeling of freedom playing in the summer meadows and fishing with my brother, what was then our favorite pastime.

During my last few terms at Cambridge, poetry took on a new emotional significance. My world had irrevocably changed, and I clung to verses that spoke of the consolations of nature and the cycle of life. Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot were sustaining, but above all I turned to Wordsworth, the poet who himself had learned:

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

Grief is isolating and is no less so when it is a shared experience. A loss that devastates a family generates a need to lean on one another, but at the same time everyone is bereft, everyone is in a state of collapse. There is an impulse to protect one another from too much raw emotion, and it can be easier to let feelings surface away from people. Trees, water, stones, and sky may be impervious to human emotion, but they don’t reject us either. Nature is unperturbed by our feelings, and because there is no contagion, we can experience a kind of consolation that helps assuage the loneliness of loss.

In the first few years that followed my father’s death, I was drawn toward nature, not in gardens, but by the sea. His ashes had been committed to the waters of The Solent near his family home on the south coast. It is a busy channel full of boats and ships, but it was on the long, solitary beaches of north Norfolk, with barely a boat in sight, that I found greatest solace. The wide horizons were the widest I had ever seen. It felt like the edge of the known world and seemed as close to my father as I could be.

Having studied Freud for one of my exam papers, I had developed an interest in the workings of the mind. I gave up the idea of staying on to do a PhD in literature and decided that as soon as I completed my English degree, I would change direction, study the sciences, and train to be a doctor. Then, in the third year of my medical training, I married Tom Stuart-Smith, for whom gardening was a way of life. I decided that if he loved it, then I would too, but if I were being honest, I’d say that I was still a garden skeptic. Gardening seemed at that point to me to be another chore that had to be done, although it was nicer (as long as the sun was shining) to be outdoors rather than indoors.

A few years after, along with our tiny baby, Rose, we moved to the Barn, close to Tom’s family home at Serge Hill in Hertfordshire. Over the next few years Rose was joined by Ben and Harry, and at the same time we hurled ourselves into making a garden from scratch. The Barn, as we had named our new home, was surrounded by an open field, and its position on a north-facing hill exposed to the winds meant that above all, we needed shelter. We carved out some plots from the stony field around us, planting trees and hedges and making enclosures of wattle fencing as well as laboring over the ground to improve it. None of this could have happened without an enormous amount of help and encouragement from Tom’s parents and a number of willing friends. When we held stone-picking parties, Rose, along with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles, joined in the task of filling up endless buckets with rocks and pebbles that needed to be carted away.

I had been physically and emotionally uprooted, and I needed to rebuild my sense of home, but still I was not particularly conscious that gardening might play a part in helping me put down roots. I was much more aware as they grew of the garden’s significance in our children’s lives. They began making dens in the bushes and spent hours inhabiting imaginary worlds of their own making, so the garden was a fantasy place and a real place at the same time.

Tom’s creative energy and vision drove our garden making forward. It wasn’t until our youngest, Harry, was a toddler that I finally started growing plants myself. I became interested in herbs and devoured books about them. This new area of learning led to experiments in the kitchen and in a little herb garden that by then had become “mine.” There were some gardening disasters, unleashing a creeping borage and a tenacious soapwort among them, but eating food flavored with all sorts of home-grown herbs was life-enhancing, and from there it was a short step to growing vegetables. The thrill I felt at this stage was all about produce!

At this point, I was in my mid-thirties, working as a junior psychiatrist in the National Health Service. In giving me something to show for my efforts, gardening provided a counterpoint to my professional life, where I was engaged with the much more intangible properties of the mind. Working on the wards and in clinic rooms was predominantly an indoor life, but the garden pulled me outdoors.

I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, fruiting. Gradually, the way I thought about “boring” jobs like weeding, hoeing, and watering changed, and I came to see that it is important not so much to get them done, but to be fully involved in doing them. Watering is calming, as long as you are not in a hurry, and strangely, when it is finished, you end up feeling refreshed, like the plants themselves.

The biggest gardening buzz I got back then, and still get now, was from growing things from seed. Seeds give no hint of what is to come, and their size bears no relation to the dormant life within. Beans erupt dramatically, not with much beauty but you can feel their thuggish vigor right from the start. Nicotiana seeds are so fine, like particles of dust, you can’t even see where you’ve sown them. It seems improbable they will ever do anything, let alone give you clouds of scented tobacco plant flowers, and yet they do. I can feel how new life creates an attachment by the way I find myself coming back almost compulsively to check on how my seeds and seedlings are doing; going out to the greenhouse, holding my breath as I enter, not wanting to disrupt anything, the stillness of life just coming into being.

Fundamentally, there is no arguing with the seasons when you are gardening, although you can get away with postponing things a little (I’ll sow those seeds or plant out those plugs next weekend). There comes a point when you realize that a delay is about to become a missed opportunity, a lost possibility, and once you have your seedlings tucked up in the soil, you are carried along, as if you have jumped into a flowing river, by the energy of the earthly calendar.

I particularly love gardening in early summer, when the growth force is at its strongest and there is so much to get in the ground. Once I’ve started, I don’t want to stop, and I carry on in the dusk till it’s almost too dark to see what I’m doing. As I finish off, the house is glowing with light and its warmth draws me back inside. The next morning when I steal out, there it is—whatever patch I was working on has settled into itself overnight.

Of course, there is no way of gardening without experiencing some disasters and ruined plans—moments when you step outside in anticipation, only to be faced with the sad remains of lovely young lettuces or a line of ruthlessly stripped leaves of kale. It has to be acknowledged that the mindless eating habits of slugs and rabbits can set off bouts of helpless rage, and the persistence and stamina of weeds can be very, very draining.

Not all the satisfaction in tending plants is about creation. The great thing about being destructive in the garden is that it is not only permissible, it is necessary, because if you don’t do it, you will be overrun. So many acts of garden care are infused with aggression, whether it is wielding the pruning shears, double digging the vegetable patch, slaughtering slugs, killing blackfly, ripping up goosegrass, or rooting out nettles. You can throw yourself into any or all of these in a wholehearted and uncomplicated way because they are a form of destructiveness that’s in the service of growth. A long session in the garden like this can leave you feeling dead on your feet but strangely renewed inside, both purged and re-energized, as if you have worked on yourself in the process. It’s a kind of gardening catharsis.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07THF5J8M
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner (July 7, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 7, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 9234 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 345 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1476794464

Best Sellers Rank: #205,660 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #5 in Gardening & Horticulture Essays (Kindle Store)
- #126 in Flowers in Biological Sciences
- #196 in Stress Management (Kindle Store)

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4.6 919 ratings

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Sue Stuart-Smith

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Sue Stuart-Smith is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author of The Well Gardened Mind. She studied English literature at the University of Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor and working in the National Health Service for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London and is a consultant at DocHealth, a not for profit, psychotherapeutic consultation service for doctors. She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire. Her book, The Well Gardened Mind, analyses the relationship between gardening and mental health.

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LyJT

Thoughtful and Illuminating Book

Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2023

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I received the book a day earlier than expected. I had just completed a few hours of gardening when it arrived. I started reading it immediately. I have only read the first 3 chapters, but the writing really speaks to me. I agree that gardening, having one's hands in the dirt, planting bulbs in the fall in anticipation of the spring, and the joy the flowers will bring after yet another harsh winter, are all a recognition that despite loss, a garden provides the opportunity for solace and regrowth in human terms. The author begins her book with the story of her remarkable grandfather and her writing draws you in.
I look forward to reading the rest of the book. I think it is a book that all gardeners should have on their shelves; not only gardeners but also people who might become gardeners from reading it. It is already a powerful, inspirational book for me, after only the first three chapters.

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alice

Very interesting book. Highly recommend.

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2023

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The author, who is a psychiatrist, explores the connection between the mind and nature.

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2023

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If you are remotely interested in the topic of this book, BUY IT. It quickly became one of my favorites, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be - maybe even better. It gave me career/higher-calling ideas, but even without that it really is a perfect balance of why gardening and mental health go hand in hand (with modern and ancient examples). If you have PTSD, trauma, depression, anxiety, and/or just like to be in nature this book will give you incredible insight. Sue Stuart-Smith really knows her psychology (I imagine her to be a very kind therapist), and the research she put in to tie her love of gardening into her career of psychology is really something!

10 people found this helpful

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Arthur L. Ranney

Engaging, but a bit simplistic

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2020

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Others in the family thought it offered them some insight into my gardening experience, but as a long-time gardener, I was looking for something a bit more theoretical or philosophical. Maybe because of my gardening experience, or perhaps due to my overall view of the world, it didn't present me with anything I hadn't already considered. In short, it affirmed much of what I already believe, but it didn't challenge me to think in a different way. A bit simplistic -- I wanted more to chew on.

16 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

This is a delightful book of meditation

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2020

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Judging by its title, a casual reader may think that The Well-Gardened Mind is a self help book in which the author argues how people can transform their lives and improve their mental health by taking up the hobby of gardening. Indeed, Sue Stuart-Smith cites many real life examples and scientific evidence to illustrate how prisoners, veterans, at-risk youth, the elderly, and the mentally ill can all benefit from the healing power of gardening.

A more discerning reader, however, will know that Stuart-Smith accomplishes a lot more than arguing for the point that every gardener already knew. The garden is magical. It gives pleasure and joy. It has the power to heal. Everyone who has ever tended a garden knows this. But not every gardener knows why. This is where Stuart Smith distinguishes herself from other self help authors. She explains the whys by delving deeper into the existential meaning of doing and being, our relationship to mother earth, our experience of time, cognition in relation to nature, and the cyclical significance of growth and decay, living and dying. In other words, this book offers a lot more than support for mental health. It is a book of meditation on the interconnectedness of all things on earth. An ambitious undertaking no doubt, but highly readable and full of surprises, this book is a must read for everyone.

82 people found this helpful

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Joe Waters

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2023

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We must cultivate our garden!

So many great lessons from this book. If you doubt the power of working the soil, read this books.

2 people found this helpful

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Chanel Blooms

Book Not for me

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2023

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Unfortunately I didn't care for this book. It just was not what I expected and so it was not something I even finished. It was very technical and difficult to read.

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2022

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Really enjoyed the voice and the weaving together of gardening & psychology. Both informative about other aspects of gardening (therapeutic applications) and motivating to get back to my own.

One person found this helpful

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Nella Miller Design

Easy to read and insightful… great gardening stories as well!

Reviewed in Canada on April 21, 2022

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Inspiration and knowledge

Andrea Gomez Beick

No parece nuevo

Reviewed in Mexico on August 2, 2020

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Es un regalo para mi mamá, cuando abrí el paquete para envolverlo, me di cuenta que no venía sellado el libro, y que el protector de polvo venía manchado, cómo si alguien con manos sucias lo hubiera manipulado

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jane sacchi

Scritta bene

Reviewed in Italy on February 28, 2021

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Argumento attuale

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Jos Perris

Beautiful book about the healing powers of nature

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2020

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A beautifully written book about the holistic healing qualities of gardening and nature. The book invites us to reflect on the life changing impact of sowing and nurturing a seed, based on the author's fascinating research among prisoners, hospital patients and people with long term mental health challenges. The author explores the significant psychological and physiological benefits of sowing, watering, weeding or simply spending time in a garden. As she says in the book: 'When we work with nature outside of us, we work with nature inside of us.' The book helps us to reconnect with our inner self; the real person that we were intended to be. We are also encouraged to reflect upon the importance of just simply 'being' rather than always 'doing'. We are reminded that the gardener plays an important enabling role with the seed; but it is in this interaction with nature, that enables both the seed and human to flourish. I really loved it and highly recommend as essential reading to all.

One person found this helpful

Granny

The value of being busy outside

Reviewed in Australia on March 2, 2021

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An excellent book about the act of gardening and its natural healing properties. In some ways it is more like a textbook although it is very readable. I have gardened nearly all my life and knew a session outside often resolved problems, but I was very interested to hear how positive it is for people with major problems such as shellshock, PTSD or those who have no direction such as young people in prison.
It sends a great message to this generation addicted to screens.

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