Tom nor I liked the idea of using chemical sprays but I had a particular fear of them because of my father’s illness. When I was a child, he developed bone marrow failure of a type that is caused by exposure to an environmental toxin. It was never entirely clear what had triggered this catastrophe but amongst the possible culprits were a long-since banned pesticide lurking in the garden shed and an antibiotic prescribed for him when he had become ill on holiday in Italy the summer before. He nearly died then but the treatment he received partially reversed the damage and, although he could not be cured, it gave him another fourteen years of life. He was tall and physically strong, so it was possible for all of us to forget at times that he was living with only half-functioning marrow in his bones. The illness was always there in the background though and when his intermittent life-threatening health crises occurred, all we could do was hope.
In that phase of my childhood, there was a garden that captured my imagination much more vividly than the one at home. My mother would take my brother, myself, and any friends in tow to the Isabella Plantation, the woodland gardens in Richmond Park. As soon as we arrived, we would run off and disappear into the massive rhododendrons to enjoy the frisson of exploring and hiding in them. So dense were the bushes that it was possible for a brief time to get lost and feel the panic of separation.
There was another more unsettling element in that garden. In a small clearing, deep in the woodland, we discovered a red and yellow painted wooden caravan, which had a sign carved above the door: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ We used to dare each other to defy the injunction but the thought of relinquishing hope was not something I could possibly have taken lightly. It felt as if opening that door might release the terrible dread I dared not name into the world. In the end, like all things unknown, the fantasy proved far more powerful than the reality. One day when we finally tried the door, it revealed a simple yellow painted interior containing a wooden bunk, and, of course, nothing terrible happened.
Whilst you are being shaped by experience, you are not aware that it is happening because, whatever it is that is going on, is simply your life; there is no other life, and it is all part of who you are. Only much later, when I began to train as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and embarked on my own analysis, did I recognise how much the structures of my childhood world had been shaken by my father’s illness. I came to understand why the injunction above the caravan door had such a hold on my childish imagination and also why, age sixteen, the news coverage of a leak from the chemical factory at Seveso in Italy seized my attention. An explosion had released a cloud of toxic gas with devastating consequences, the full extent of which only gradually emerged. The soil was poisoned and the health of local people suffered serious, long-term consequences. The disaster mobilised something in me and for the first time I became aware of environmental issues and their politics. Such are the workings of the unconscious that I did not see a parallel with whatever unknown chemical had made my father so ill. I only knew I had undergone a powerful environmental awakening.
Turning over the past and revisiting memories like this in the course of my analysis involved a different kind of awakening – to the life of the mind. I came to understand that grief can go underground and that feelings can hide other feelings. Moments of new insight ripple through the psyche, shaking and stirring it up, and although some may be welcome and refreshing, others can be more difficult to assimilate and adjust to. Alongside all this, I was gardening.
A garden gives you a protected physical space which helps increase your sense of mental space and it gives you quiet, so you can hear your own thoughts. The more you immerse yourself in working with your hands, the more free you are internally to sort feelings out and work them through. These days, I turn to gardening as a way of calming and decompressing my mind. Somehow, the jangle of competing thoughts inside my head clears and settles as the weed bucket fills up. Ideas that have been lying dormant come to the surface and thoughts that are barely formed sometimes come together and unexpectedly take shape. At times like these, it feels as if alongside all the physical activity, I am also gardening my mind.
I have come to understand that deep existential processes can be involved in creating and caring for a garden. So I find myself asking, How does gardening have its effects on us? How can it help us find or re-find our place in the world when we feel we have lost it? At this point in the twenty-first century, with rates of depression and anxiety and other mental disorders seemingly ever on the rise and with a general way of life that is increasingly urbanised and technology-dependent, it is, perhaps, more important than ever to understand the many ways in which mind and garden interact.
Gardens have been recognised as restorative since ancient times. Today, gardening consistently features as one of the top ten most popular hobbies in a range of countries around the world. Quintessentially, caring for a garden is a nurturing activity and for many people, along with having children and raising a family, the process of tending a plot is one of the most significant things in their lives. There are, of course, those for whom gardening feels like a chore and who would always prefer to do something else but the combination of outdoor exercise and immersive activity is acknowledged by many as both calming and invigorating. Although other forms of green exercise and other creative activities can have these benefits, the close relationship that is formed with plants and the earth is unique to gardening. Contact with nature affects us on different levels; sometimes we are filled with it, fully present and conscious of its effects, but it also works on us slowly and subconsciously in a way that can be particularly helpful for people suffering from trauma, illness and loss.
The poet William Wordsworth explored perhaps more intensely than anyone else the influence of nature on the inner life of the mind. He was psychologically prescient and his ability to tune in to the subconscious means he is sometimes regarded as a forerunner of psychoanalytic thinking. In a leap of intuition, which modern neuroscience confirms, Wordsworth understood that our sense impressions are not passively recorded, rather we construct experience even as we are undergoing it. As he put it, we ‘half-create’ as well as perceive the world around us. Nature animates the mind and the mind, in turn, animates nature. Wordsworth believed that a living relationship with nature like this is a source of strength that can help foster the healthy growth of the mind. He also understood what it means to be a gardener.
for Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, the process of gardening together was an important act of restitution. It was a response to loss, for their parents had died when they were young and they then endured a lengthy and painful separation from each other. When they settled at Dove Cottage in the Lake District, the garden they created became a central feature of their lives and helped them recover an inner sense of home. They cultivated vegetables, medicinal herbs and other useful plants but much of the plot was highly naturalistic and sloped steeply up the hillside. This little ‘nook of mountain-ground’, as Wordsworth referred to it, was full of ‘gifts’ of wildflowers, ferns and mosses that he and Dorothy had collected on their walks and brought back, like offerings to the earth.
Wordsworth frequently worked on his poems in that garden. He described the essence of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ and it is true for all of us that we need to be in the right kind of setting to enter the calm state of mind needed for processing powerful or turbulent feelings. The Dove Cottage garden, with its sense of safe enclosure and lovely views beyond, gave him just that. He wrote many of his greatest poems whilst living there and developed what would be a life-long habit of pacing out rhythms and chanting verses aloud whilst striding along garden paths. So the garden was both a physical setting for the house as well as a setting for the mind; one that was all the more significant for having been shaped by his and Dorothy’s own hands.
Wordsworth’s love of horticulture is a less well-known aspect of his life but he remained a devoted gardener well into old age. He created a number of different gardens, including a sheltered winter garden for his patron Lady Beaumont. Conceived of as a therapeutic refuge, it was designed to alleviate her attacks of melancholy. the purpose
