This may well be one of the most important books about gardening I ever review – and it isn’t even a gardening book. Having suffered from anxiety and depression all my life, the current and very welcome public enthusiasm to talk about the role of nature and how, by letting it into your life, it can help your mental health is very important to me. And I certainly do try to use my garden to help deal with my emotions, when it doesn’t overwhelm me.
Sue Stuart-Smith is a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, who is also married to top garden designer, Tom Stuart-Smith. Therefore, she is in the best possible excellent position to discuss this exceptionally important topic – at a time when the UK’s and the World’s mental health has never been poorer. And as I say, The Well Gardened Mind isn’t a gardening book. You will not learn how Tom creates his professional gardens or how to prune roses. What you will learn is how important it is to create and enjoy gardens and nature; and how important it is to prune roses (or whatever you can do), however badly and inexpertly, to boost your own connection to nature.
The author also discusses the science of the mind and brain, using her experience of psychiatry and psychotherapy, together with descriptions of projects that have been undertaken to help people in different situations. She also discusses significant people (for example, Wilfred Owen and Winston Churchill), who have commented on and/or benefitted from enlightened approaches to welfare, nature and general wellbeing, especially when recovering from trauma.
In this way, she covers the ground – the relationships between human nature and nature itself, the effect of flowers on our moods, spending time in the garden, how public bodies can bring nature into cities, safe green spaces, nature and dying, and the use of gardens in hospitals to promote healing, to name but a few of her myriad topics. And her writing style is certainly very welcoming, such that, even if she is talking about difficult topics, it doesn’t feel that way.
This is an excellent book. As Stephen Fry says in his own review:
The Well Gardened Mind is a wholly convincing story of how troubled minds might find a way of reconnecting to themselves and rebuilding confidence and hope by way of nature”.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World, by Sue Stuart-Smith, William Collings (2020), London. 342 pages (Hardback), ISBN: 978-0-00-810071-1
