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The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature - Hardcover

Stuart-Smith, Sue

 
9781476794464: The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1476794464 ISBN 13: 9781476794464
Verlag: Scribner, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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,...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476794464
ISBN 13 
9781476794464
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
352
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SCRIBNER
https://www.simonandschusterpublishing.com/scribner/

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