Psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith on the healing power of gardening

A piece from our June 2024 issue on gardening as a life-changer, and even sometimes life-saver
Tom Stuart Smith's National Garden Scheme garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2024Eva Nemeth

Propagating plants from seed is what hooked me into gardening. Even now, after years of watching seeds transform themselves, the magic of germination never fails to thrill me. The essence of gardening is change and the work of gardening is care. Nothing stays the same for long. The hands-on physicality of weeding, digging and planting is a great antidote to looking at a screen, which many of us are doing more than ever today.

The great 20th-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung recognised the value of gardening because he believed modern lifestyles had alienated people from the ‘dark, maternal, earthy ground of our being’. He was describing the ancient connection with the earth that we can experience in the garden. Tending plants puts us in touch with the cycle of life, where destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. In working with nature’s powers of transformation, we can find ourselves feeling quietly transformed too. Many people report that creating and caring for a garden has helped them work through difficult life experiences such as trauma or loss.

In my mid-twenties, when I married the garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, I knew nothing about gardening and I’m ashamed to admit I regarded it as a form of outdoor housework. Then, early in our marriage, we had an amazing opportunity to make a garden from scratch at our home, a converted barn in Hertfordshire. As Tom’s creative vision for the windy field around us began to take shape, I gradually came to see gardening differently. When our youngest child started school, I launched myself into tending the vegetable garden we had created. I came to realise that gardening is not so much an activity as a relationship – that is a relationship with place, with nature and, to some extent, with existence itself.

Illustration by Alexis Bruchon

The gardener enters into a living relationship in which they are never entirely in control. We may feel empowered by shaping part of our environment and that temporarily we have some control, but sooner or later Mother Nature reminds us of the limits of our powers. This mix of empowerment and disempowerment is one of the things that makes gardening so compelling. We learn to persist and to cope with disappointment while celebrating our successes. The transformative power of gardening involves a wide range of effects, which encompass the emotional, spiritual, physical and social aspects of life. I set out to capture the full scope of these in my book The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World (William Collins, £9.99). During my research, I interviewed people from gardening projects that involved prisoners, veterans and at-risk youth, as well as those suffering from depression, anxiety and addiction. Many spoke of gardening as a life-changing experience; for some, it had been a life-saving experience. Hearing their testimonies was deeply moving.

Another view of Tom Stuart-Smith's Chelsea garden in 2024

Eva Nemeth

One of the most memorable encounters I had was with a group of prisoners at Rikers Island, New York’s largest jail. Many of them were struggling with intense feelings of shame and were desperate to change their lives, if only they could find a way. Gardening gave them something tangible in the form of the produce they grew; they could look at and share it, and feel they had done something worthwhile. The project is run by The Horticultural Society of New York, which crucially provides internships in the community after release. Around 60 per cent of Rikers prisoners are back inside jail within three years, but among those who attend this community gardening programme, the reoffending rate falls to less than 15 per cent. Gardening can bring about many changes and, in this case, the most important change was the development of self-belief.

Over the last couple of years, Tom and I have been putting some of the insights from my book into practice by transforming an old orchard close to our home. In this one-acre plot, we are developing a community and education project called The Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity and Health. Around the building at its heart is a unique collection of over 1,500 herbaceous perennials set out in one-metre-square plots. This Plant Library is an ongoing experiment that will act as a learning resource and provide our partner learning-disability charity, Sunnyside Rural Trust, with stock beds for the small nursery it is establishing here. The project launches this summer when we start working with local schools, charities and other community groups that want to learn about gardening and experience the healing power of nature. We will also be running a programme of talks, workshops and garden visits open to all. Come and join us if you can.

sergehillproject.co.uk