Neasden is a funny old place. I am not even sure I live there. If you want a haircut, every shop seems to be a hairdressers. If you are after a drink in a pleasant pub, forget it. The last one (which wasn’t that nice) closed a few years ago and the premises remain and empty. I do support ‘Ashen-faced’ Ron Knee’s Neasden Utd against Dollis Hill Utd (latest score 1 – 0, Dollis Hill, own goal Pevsner c.f. Private Eye), but that’s about it.

However, I do have a lovely, quite long (but narrow) garden, which is rare in this part of London. And many of my neighbours – both immediate and more remote – often take immense effort to make what little space London has provided them to produce beautiful and/or entertaining gardens and places to enjoy the outdoors.

So, what is it about urban gardening that makes it important?

In that classic satire, Candide by Voltaire, the eponymous hero ultimately decides that all we should do is cultivate our own garden (“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”). That is, we should take care of our own needs before trying to take care of others – if you take care of your own, the world will take care of itself.

Having suffered from anxiety and depression for all my life – both as an adult and as a child – the current public acknowledgement about the role of nature, gardens and gardening, on the one hand, and mental health, on the other, is extremely important to me. And I do try to use my garden to help deal with my turbulent emotions. However, I have often considered Candide’s suggestion as an instruction to retreat into myself (my garden) and cut the world out and stop it from hurting me.

I am not sure that this is entirely the correct interpretation of Monsieur Voltaire’s and Candide’s instruction. That is, if you start to look after yourself, may be you will be able to go out into the world beyond your garden to make a difference. Gardens are, and should also be, productive places (especially if you grow you own) – the effort you put in will reward you in a myriad of ways.

And that’s why I decided to create this website – to share my thoughts on gardening and also mental health. I want this website to be informative, with advice about how to garden in urban environments and reviews of gardens to visit, book reviews of the best gardening books, and mental health advice (to the extent I am qualified to provide it). And, through this website, I also want to learn more about the subject I love (gardening) and about its relationship with mental health – and to discuss this with you in interesting and amusing ways.

And lots of pictures, pictures, pictures …

I will try to update this blog/website on a regular basis – full of photographs of my plants, book reviews, articles and much else besides. In this way, I hope that it will be a journey about gardening, mental health and not a little fun.

So, please keep coming back and let me know what you think. And please be patient as I build up the content. I am not an expert like the Monty Dons of this world, but I do have a couple decades of experience, so will share my successes and certainly my failures. Let’s explore this together and see how it goes …