Garden Essay

There are freshness and light coolness in the air.The ray of the sun is trying to force its way through the trunks of the trees, giving an opportunity for this wonderful place to shine.A bee is trying to find right flower flying from one to another.I can feel this peaceful life around me when i go to garden,though it may be looked like i am alone.I can’t really imagine that out of the gates of this botanic garden all people hurry somewhere,trying to their deeds as fast as they can. Most garden would prefer to be busy in the garden,rather than think about how tilling the soil and growing plants affects the mind but as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist.I cannot resist reflecting on these thing.This is the partly because of my own gardening experiences but also because there is renewal of interest in horticultural therapy.Gardening make us feel renewed inside.I turn to gardening as a way of calming my mind,a kind of decompressing after a hard week in the consulting room.The jangle of competing thought inside my head somehow clears and settles as the weed buckets fills up,and ideas that are barely formed take shape.

A session in the garden can leave you feeling dead on your feet.but strangely renewed inside.One of the things that set me thinking about gardening and the mind was a patient of mine who suffered from severe, recurrent depression. In her childhood she experienced emotional neglect and violent abuse and as an adult had great difficulty in forming positive relationships. She started to feel that her life was blighted.Plants are much less frightening and challenging than people, so a garden may be an accessible way of reconnecting with our life-giving impulses. Background noise falls away and you can escape from other people’s thoughts and judgments, so that within a garden there is, perhaps, more freedom to feel good about yourself. I think this relief from the interpersonal might, paradoxically, be a way of reconnecting with our humanity. The peacefulness of gardens and gardening arises partly through this escape from other people.

As Freud said: “Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” But when it comes to growing things, for all its solace, this world of plants can feel mysterious and intimidating to an outsider. Anyone new to gardening is invariably anxious they won’t have “green fingers”.What I am talking about involves the very beginnings: how plants grow from seed. I am almost ridiculously proud of our asparagus bed because it started life in my hands, as a packet of seed. If you are a very seasoned gardener it is easy to forget the magic of surprise that forms the basis of this illusion, although I recently caught a glimpse of it in my garden designer husband, Tom, when some tree peony seedlings sprouted after three years, just as he was about to give up.Garden is meaningful to me because when i start gardening it is a part of my life and now gardening is my life.