Designing a Garden to Benefit your Mental Health- An Introduction

I’ve noticed a common thread over the past 2 years in the stories you tell me. Time and time again you’ve told me how flowers have brought hope, comfort, joy in hard times. You’ve shared how flowers have joined in your celebrations and how they’ve comforted in times of loss.

Intrinsically I’ve known these things for a long time, but I guess I’ve never connected so much with people over flowers as I have the past 2 years. When you spend as much time outside as I do, you very acutely feel it when you are forced indoors for too long. This acute change is the way I imagine you feel when you first notice the power of flowers.

Flowers have been a life long love and out of that came gardening. I began gardening later in life, about 20 years ago. It began as a hobby- the sheer joy and amazement of seeing a tiny seed turn into a plant!

However over the last 2 years, I’ve realized my garden is my sanity. I love the reward of a good harvest. But the journey from seed to harvest has become the more fascinating part.

I’m very goal oriented and for years I was always working hard to accomplish the goal and then move on to the next thing. But I’ve begun to see how much I miss when I overlook the journey; I fail to stop along the way and notice the small milestones. I recently heard farming described as “the work of a lifetime”. Gardens are this way too, they are never truly finished.

I’m endeavoring to see my garden as an evolving world with a life of it’s own. (Because let’s face it— it has a life of it’s own— millions of tiny organisms living within our gardens!)

Through observing the process I’ve begun to see how beneficial the garden is to my mental health. It’s become more than just an escape.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share some tips and introduce some ideas to explore so that you can create (or add to) a garden to benefit your mental health.

This series has been brewing in my mind for a long time but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. So I decided to think about what our brains need for a healthy mental state. There are a lot of aspects but I’ve chosen a few to discuss in this series. Hope on over to part 1 to begin.