The Well Gardened Mind

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 of a garden such as this was, he wrote, ‘to assist Nature in moving affections’. In providing a concentrated dose of the healing effects of nature, gardens influence us primarily through our feelings but however much they may be set apart as a refuge, we are nevertheless, as Wordsworth described, ‘in the midst of the realities of things’. These realities encompass all the beauties of nature as well as the cycle of life and the passing of the seasons. In other words, however much they can offer us respite, gardens also put us in touch with fundamental aspects of life.

Like a suspension in time, the protected space of a garden allows our inner world and the outer world to coexist free from the pressures of everyday life. Gardens in this sense, offer us an in-between space which can be a meeting place between our innermost, dream-infused selves and the real physical world. This kind of blurring of boundaries is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a ‘transitional’ area of experience. Winnicott’s conceptualisation of transitional processes was to some extent influenced by Wordsworth’s understanding of how we inhabit the world through a combination of perception and imagination.

Winnicott was also a paediatrician and his model of the mind is about the child in relation to the family and the baby in relation to the mother. He emphasised that a baby can only exist by virtue of a relationship with a care-giver. When we look at a mother and baby from the outside it is easy to distinguish them as two separate beings, but the subjective experience of each is not so clear-cut. The relationship involves an important area of overlap or in-between through which the mother feels the baby’s feelings as the baby expresses them and the baby in turn does not yet know where it begins and its mother ends.

Much as there can be no baby without a care-giver, there can be no garden without a gardener. A garden is always the expression of someone’s mind and the outcome of someone’s care. In the process of gardening too, it is not possible to neatly categorise what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not-me’. When we step back from our work how can we tease apart what nature has provided and what we have contributed? Even in the midst of the action itself, it is not necessarily clear. Sometimes when I am fully absorbed in a garden task, a feeling arises within me that I am part of this and it is part of me; nature is running in me and through me.

A garden embodies transitional space by being in-between the home and the landscape that lies beyond. Within it, wild nature and cultivated nature overlap and the gardener’s scrabbling about in the earth is not at odds with dreams of paradise or civilised ideals of refinement and beauty. The garden is a place where these polarities come together, maybe the one place where they can so freely come together.

Winnicott believed that play was psychologically replenishing but he emphasised that in order to enter an imaginary world, we need to feel safe and free from scrutiny. He employed one of his trademark paradoxes to capture this experience when he wrote of how important it is for a child to develop the ability to be ‘alone in the presence of the mother’. In my gardening, I often recapture a feeling of being absorbed in play – it is as if in the safe curtilage of the garden, I am in the kind of company that allows me to be alone and enter my own world. Both daydreaming and playing are increasingly recognised to contribute to psychological health and these benefits do not stop with the end of childhood.

The emotional and physical investment that working on a place entails means that over time it becomes woven into our sense of identity. As such it can be a protective part of our identity too, one that can help buffer us when the going gets tough. But as the traditional pattern of a rooted relationship to place has been lost, so we have lost sight of the potentially stabilising effects on us of forming an attachment to place.

the field of attachment theory was pioneered by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby in the 1960s, and there is now an extensive research base associated with it. Bowlby regarded attachment as ‘the bedrock’ of human psychology. He was also a keen naturalist and this informed the development of his ideas. He described how birds return to the same place to build their nests year after year, often close to where they were born and how animals do not roam about at random, as is often thought, but occupy a ‘home’ territory around their lair or burrow. In the same way, he wrote, ‘each man’s environment is unique to himself’.

attachment to place and attachment to people share an evolutionary pathway and a quality of uniqueness is central to both. The feeding of an infant is not enough on its own to trigger bonding because we are biologically encoded to attach through the specificity of smells, textures and sounds, as well as pleasurable feelings. Places, too, evoke feelings and natural settings are particularly rich in sensory pleasures. These days we are increasingly surrounded by functional places lacking in character and individuality, like supermarkets and shopping malls. Whilst they provide us with food and other useful things, we don’t develop affectionate bonds for them; in fact they are often deeply unrestorative. As a result, the notion of place in contemporary life has increasingly been reduced to a backdrop and the interaction, if there is any, tends to be of a transient nature, rather than a living relationship that might be sustaining.

At the heart of Bowlby’s thinking is the idea that the mother is the very first place of all. Children seek out her protective arms whenever they are frightened, tired or upset. This ‘safe haven’ becomes what Bowlby called a ‘secure base’ through repeated small experiences of separation and loss that are followed by reunion and recovery. When a feeling of security has been established, a child becomes emboldened to explore its surroundings, but still keeps half an eye on its mother as a safe place to return to.

It is a sad fact of modern childhood that playing outdoors has become something of a rarity but traditionally parks and gardens provided the setting for an important kind of imaginative and exploratory play. Creating dens in the bushes as ‘adult-free’ zones is a way of rehearsing future independence and they have an emotional role too. research shows that when children are upset, they instinctively use their ‘special’ places as a safe haven in which they feel protected while their unsettled feelings subside.

Attachment and loss, as Bowlby revealed, go together. We are not primed to dis-attach, we are primed to seek reunion. It is the very strength of our attachment system that makes recovering from loss so painful and difficult. Whilst we have a strong inborn capacity to form bonds, there is nothing in our biology that helps us deal with bonds that get broken and it means that mourning is something we have to learn through experience.

In order to cope with loss, we need to find or re-find a safe haven and feel the comfort and sympathy of others. For Wordsworth, who had suffered the pain of bereavement as a child, the gentle aspects of the natural world provided a consoling and sympathetic presence. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein alludes to this in one of her papers on the subject of mourning where she writes: ‘The poet tells us that Nature mourns with the mourner.’ She goes on to show how, in order to emerge from a state of grief, we need to recover a sense of goodness in the world and in ourselves.

When someone very close to us dies, it is as if a part of us dies too. We want to hold on to that closeness and shut down our emotional pain. But at some point the question arises – can we bring ourselves alive again? In tending a plot and nurturing and caring for plants we are constantly faced with disappearance and return. The natural cycles of growth and decay can help us understand and accept that mourning is part of the cycle of life and that when we can’t mourn, it is as if a perpetual winter takes hold of us.

We can also be helped by rituals or other forms of symbolic action that enable us to make sense of the experience. But in the secular and consumerist worlds that many of us now inhabit, we have lost touch with traditional rituals and rites of passage that might help us navigate our way through life. Gardening itself can be a form of ritual. It transforms external reality and gives rise to beauty around us but it also works within us, through its symbolic meaning. A garden puts us in touch with a set of metaphors that have profoundly shaped the human psyche for thousands of years – metaphors so deep they are almost hidden within our thinking.

Gardening is what happens when two creative energies meet – human creativity and nature’s creativity. It is a place of overlap between what is ‘me’ and ‘not-me’, between what we can conceive of and what the environment gives us to work with. So, we bridge the gap between the dreams in our head and the ground under our feet and know that while we cannot stop the forces of death and destruction, we can, at least, defy them.

Somewhere in the recesses of my memory lay hidden a story that I must have heard in childhood which came back to me on writing this book. It is a classic fairy tale of the type that involves a king with a lovely daughter and suitors queuing up for her hand. The king decides to get rid of the suitors by setting them an impossible challenge. He decrees that the only person who can marry his daughter is someone who brings him an object so unique and so special that no one in the world has set eyes on it before. His gaze, and his gaze alone, has to be the first to fall on it. The suitors duly travel to far-flung, exotic locations seeking the prize they hope will guarantee their success and return bearing unusual and novel gifts that they have not even glimpsed themselves. Carefully wrapped and extraordinary as their findings are, another human eye has always looked on them before – someone has either made the beautiful objects, or found them, like the gem from the deepest diamond mine which is the rarest and most precious gift of them all.

The palace gardener has a son who is secretly in love with the princess and interprets the challenge in a different way – one that is informed by his close relationship with the natural world. The trees around the grounds are groaning with nuts and he presents one to the king, along with a pair of nutcrackers. The king is bemused at being given something as ordinary as a nut, but then the gardener’s son explains that if the king cracks the nut open he will see something that no living soul has ever set eyes on before. The king, of course, has to honour his pledge; so in the way of all good fairy stories, it is a tale of rags to riches and lovers united. But it is also about how the wonders of nature may be revealed to us if we do not overlook them. More than that, it is a tale about human empowerment because nature is accessible to us all.

If there were no loss in the world we would lack the motivation to create. As the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal wrote: ‘It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair – it is then that we must recreate our world anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, recreate life.’ Gardening is about setting life in motion and seeds, like dead fragments, help us recreate the world anew.

It is just this newness that is so compelling in the garden, life endlessly reforming and reshaping itself. The garden is a place where we can be in on its beginning and have a hand in its making. Even the humble potato patch offers this opportunity, for in turning over the mounded-up earth, a cluster of potatoes that no one has set eyes on before is brought into the light.

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