Coming in from the garden, once again I’m heading for the medicine
cabinet. This time it’s for disinfectant to help to work out a rose
thorn splinter, yesterday it was thermal rub to ease back pain, and soon
it’ll be antihistamines to stem the sneezes. “There you are,” says my
totally non-green-fingered partner, “I told you gardening was
dangerous.”
As someone who doesn’t know his agapanthus from his amaranthus, he
would, wouldn’t he? But he also knows that if it weren’t for gardening, I
might well have been down at the doctor’s surgery not for antibiotics
but for antidepressants. For me and countless others, gardening can be
the best form of therapy to get one through the toughest of times, an
antidote to stress and depression.
In the late 19th century there was a philanthropic movement to
distribute plants to the urban poor. Caring for these plants, even just
one red geranium on a windowsill, could, it was suggested, lift the
spirits and encourage the most depressed person to take a pride in his
or her surroundings. We may scoff at such condescending assumptions
today but few of us would deny the uplifting effect of a bunch of
flowers. But gardening? Isn’t it too physical, too frustrating to have
any form of calming influence?
Since the middle of the last century, it has been assumed that the
person disappearing down to the allotment is more likely to be a man.
But with allotment sites so highly prized and a new generation of family
gardeners taking them over, the male domination of the garden has all
but disappeared.
Across the centuries, when it comes to getting away from it all, it
has been women who are more likely to turn to their gardens. It is where
they can unwind in a space that brings them close to nature, puts
distance between them and household chores, and gives them privacy and
emotional respite. For some women, it is much more than that — it is a
lifeline to sanity, as I have experienced myself.
As a child, I thought I hated gardening. My mother and my aunt were
passionate gardeners and seemed to spend my childhood talking about the
relative merits of this clematis or that rose. My cousin and I swore we
were never going to be like that.
But of course, as soon as we had gardens of our own, we were. While I
struggled to bring up my daughters (I had three under 3), my garden, a
typical long, narrow London shape, was given over to sandpits and
climbing frames. But then something strange happened. I began to take
notice of the plants and tried to nurture them. As my daughters grew, so
did my flower beds. I divided the garden into “rooms” and packed it
with old roses and scented perennials. I devoured plant catalogues,
visited gardens across the country, and even opened my own through the Yellow
Book, so keen was I to share my new-found love.
Gardening remained a common thread between me and my mother for the
next 20 years, and we shared thoughts and ideas about plants as much as
we did about children and grandchildren. When she developed Alzheimer’s
ten years ago, that thread was broken. One of the cruellest blows was to
see her no longer care about her beloved, beautifully chaotic garden.
We chose her room at the nursing home where she spent the last painful
weeks of her life because of its view over the gardens, even though she
was completely unaware of them. Probably just as well as they were far
too manicured for her liking.
Hospital visits, dealing with carers and social services, all the
draining aspects of looking after someone you love who is disintegrating
in front of your eyes, left little time in my life for normality.
There was only one place that I found true escape — my garden. Here I
could become absorbed, if only for a few minutes each day, tapping pots
to see if they needed watering, checking on slug deaths, pinching off
side shoots, potting on seedlings. The garden needed me, and I needed
it. Somehow working there kept me in touch with the mother who had
always been my closest gardening companion. I would sit on a bench and
cry because, as anyone who has a close family member with Alzheimer’s
will tell you, the feelings of bereavement start long before his or her
death. Smelling a shared, favourite-scented rose would help to bring
back memories of happier days.
I don’t know why this should surprise me. Gardening has always been a
source of solace to women. In medieval times, the hortus conclusus
(enclosed garden) was a sanctuary for women where they had freedom to
read and talk privately as well as to maintain the plants and flowers.
The traumas of family life hit all levels of society. In the mid-17th
century, Mary, later Duchess of Beaufort, having been widowed for the
first time at a young age, sank into a deep depression. She had, a
friend wrote, “gone almost into a mopishness with melancholy.” Until,
that is, she started gardening. She spent the rest of her life building
up a collection of thousands of exotic plants at her two homes of
Badminton and Beaufort House, which were the envy of every
horticulturalist in the country.
In the 18th century, Henrietta, Lady Luxborough, after a mild
flirtation, lost access to her children and was banished to a dull
country estate by her jealous husband. Cut off from family and friends,
with the unbearable prospect of never seeing her children again, what
did she do? She set about creating a garden, corresponding with
botanists, and she probably invented the word “shrubbery”.
The writer Virginia Woolf, in the early 20th century, urged women to
aspire to A Room of One’s Own. In reality few women have
such a luxury. The kitchen may be associated with the homemaker but
somehow, for many women, this doesn’t play quite as special a role as
the garden.
For Juliet Meadows, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was the greenhouse at
the end of her garden that became a place of sanctuary as she struggled
to survive a marriage dominated by a bullying husband. Now divorced, she
remembers the relief of having somewhere to disappear to. “My husband
was very jealous and didn’t like me doing things outside the home. But
being in the garden was somehow OK. The real bonus was that he wasn’t
interested in gardening at all so he just left me to it.
“I used to spend hours locked away potting up seedlings and
propagating my pelargoniums — even squashing greenfly kept me sane. I
could find an inner calmness in my greenhouse that was never present in
my home. Although of course he could reach me when I was out there, he
rarely did. Despite his possessiveness, he knew the garden was my world,
something he was never part of.”
Mental stress is often a symptom of serious illness. Yet few doctors
would recommend gardening as the best activity for a convalescent. Five
years ago, Linda Rogers was admitted to hospital for major surgery. Her
condition was life threatening and, after a long spell in hospital, she
was warned that her recovery would be slow. Previously she had held a
high-stress job but the illness and subsequent surgery left her
shattered, with little hope of returning to a normal lifestyle for
months.
“Released from hospital in springtime, I’d lost both the confidence
and physical strength to venture out in public. So I turned to the
garden — private, safe and a place in which to test my “powers”. There I
could stagger about, without feebly hanging on to a lamppost, having
run out of “oomph”.
“Once among the plants and trees, I’d forget how poorly I’d been. And
‘tooled up’ with secateurs, I felt useful. Heaving the vacuum cleaner
around was off-limits but snipping this and that in the garden offered
gentle aerobic exercise, fresh air, and provided a kind of natural
physiotherapy.
“I replaced worrying about whether I was going to drop dead at any
moment with things such as wondering how far the clematis would spread
over the arch and was it too early to plant the tomatoes. Gardening,
unlike other pursuits, goes at its own pace; it allowed me to do the
same.”
Bunny Guinness, the Chelsea-gold-medal winner, is a great advocate of
gardening as therapy. “Stresses and worries peel away as the body
loosens up through physical activity. Breathing becomes deeper, the
scents lift our moods, and we lose ourselves in the movements —
sometimes gentle and slow, sometimes thoroughly sweat-inducing — that
make up our gardening routines.
“I have seen gardeners who are depressed, recovering from illness or
less mobile than they once were, gaining huge benefit from designing and
cultivating their own landscapes. Gardening seems to engender a sense
of accomplishment, which in turn boosts self-confidence and helps us to
deal with other aspects of life.”
Guinness is encouraged by the results of horticultural therapy where
gardening can be used as a way of regaining a sense of control over
life, and beating depression. “Consider the sheer act of hope that is
required to plan and plant a garden,” points out Marilyn Mountford, a
horticultural therapist. “The style is not important, it is the personal
pleasure that it creates. This sense of inner well-being influences our
health and the way we perceive ourselves.”
The physical benefits of gardening are obvious: sensibly done, an
hour’s digging can burn up 300 calories. And, of course, there’s fresh
air and no gym fees. The mental benefits are harder to quantify but can
add up to no counselling fees, no anti-depressants.The physical work of
gardening can also release those precious endorphines, such as serotonin
and dopamine, which give us that exercise high. There are few
activities where one can lose oneself so completely — and end up finding
oneself a happier, calmer person. If you’re stressed or depressed, get
out in the garden. By caring for your plants, you’ll be caring for
yourself.
Some names have been changed.
Catherine Horwood is the author of Gardening Women: Their Stories,
from 1600 to the Present (Virago, £17.99).
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