July 01st, 2025

Gardening for Wellbeing

​Gardening has always been regarded as a hobby that provides health benefits. The physical act of gardening is a good work out.  I wear a fitness watch while gardening and I get my 10,000 steps in every day.  The bending, digging, and lifting can keep us fit, maintain flexibility and balance, and keep us feeling young. The medical community is studying the effect of being outside and engaging with nature on illness prevention and mental wellbeing.
According to Mayo Clinic’s Speaking of Health newsletter, gardening has “been shown to lighten mood and lower levels of stress and anxiety.”  All new hospitals in the U.K. must be designed with a garden for both patients and staff and many existing hospitals in both the U.K and the United States already have gardens.   Particularly during the Covid lockdown, these gardens became places of solace and peace.  Doctors in UK are even prescribing garden therapy for people with anxiety or depression.  There are gardening programs in the UK especially for people suffering from PTSD and they are quite successful.  I am not sure that in this country we are quite there yet, but it is something to consider and cheaper than those medications you see advertised constantly on the television.
 
One thing that has been studied for the past few years is the transformative effect gardening can have on people.  The act of being outside and interacting with nature is and can be good for the body and the soul.  This is wonderfully documented in one of my favorite movies titled “Greenfingers.”  It is a story of a group of prison inmates who find redemption and solace in planting a garden that goes on to win a major gardening award.  The film is based upon a true story of inmates at HMP (His Majesty’s Prison) Leyhill, a minimum security prison in the English Cotswolds.  The story is loosely based on the prison gardeners’ success at winning prizes at various prestigious flower shows and encouraging a prison gardening program that exists to this day.  Upon release many of the former inmates found jobs in horticulture or landscaping.
Another excellent examination of the power of gardening on mental well-being is Psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Sue Stuart-Smith’s seminal work about gardening and wellbeing titled “The Well-Gardened Mind:  The Restorative Power of Nature.”  She came to gardening after her marriage to one of the world’s foremost garden designers, Tom Stuart-Smith.  She writes “Like a suspension in time, the protected space of a garden allows our inner world and outer world to coexist free from the pressures of everyday life.”  In study after study, the writer takes us on a horticultural journey to such diverse places as a drug rehabilitation center in Italy, a garden at San Quentin Prison in California, The New Roots Community Garden in the Bronx, New York, and a rehabilitative garden in Alnarp, Sweden.  All use gardening as a form of therapy and renewal.
Two therapy gardens in the U.K. which I find interesting are Maggie’s Centres and Horatio’s Gardens.  Maggie’s Centres were started by a young woman, Maggie Keswick Jencks, who was diagnosed with breast cancer and felt that she did not have a serene place in the hospital to process her diagnosis.  She was a gardener and felt that hospitals were sterile and not places of comfort.  She and her husband made plans for centers for cancer patients and their caregivers that were in stand alone buildings with gardens.  The emphasis in a Maggie’s Centre is that it is a place of calm and welcoming.  There is no signage, no uniforms, but there is always a kettle on for tea as well as outdoor space in a garden. Some even have greenhouses.  Many famous architects and garden designers have volunteered their services to plan and build these places.   Usually on the grounds of a hospital, these gathering places provide all kinds of support from workshops on financial aid to how to talk to children about cancer.  All are at no cost to the patient or family.
Horatio’s Garden is a charity founded by two doctors whose son was tragically killed on a school trip.  Their son, Horatio, had worked at a spinal rehabilitation facility and wanted to become a doctor.  He was concerned that patients recovering from a spinal injury did not have safe access to the outdoors and gardens.  In his memory, the charity Horatio’s Garden was born.  These gardens are built on the grounds of spinal injury hospitals and again, world famous garden designers have been honored to create these sanctuaries that are so accessible that even hospital beds are accommodated.  When surveying the patients and the impact of the garden, 100% of the patients wrote that Horatio’s Garden improved their wellbeing and 95% said that it helped their mental health.
Plants do not argue and they have no agenda.  Gardens and green space are ecological, cost effective, and promote a healthy lifestyle.  Gardens provide something in our rather chaotic world that we can control and nurture with our own hands often in restorative solitude.