The Well Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power Of Nature

Author: Sue Stuart-Smith

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General Fields

  • : 14.99 AUD
  • : 9780008100711
  • : HarperCollins Publishers Limited
  • : Harper Element
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  • : June 2019
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  • : 49.99
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  • : June 2021
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  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Sue Stuart-Smith
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  • : Hardback
  • : 2004
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  • : English
  • : 320
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Barcode 9780008100711
9780008100711

Description

Those who work with the earth have known for years: there's a miraculous quality to gardening. In a mix of psychology, neuroscience and stories from around the world, Sue Stuart-Smith breaks ground to explore the power of interacting with nature, and how the garden can prove a vital place to cultivate the mind. The garden has always been a place of peace and perseverance, of nurture and reward. A garden can provide a family's food, a child's playground, and an adult's peaceful retreat. But around the world and throughout history, gardens have often meant something more profound.


For Sue Stuart-Smith's grandfather, returning from the First World War weighing six stone, a year-long horticulture course became a life raft for recovering from the trauma. For prisoners in today's justice system, gardening can be a mental escape from captivity which offers, in a context when opportunity is scarce, the chance to take ownership of a project and build something positive up from seed.


In The Well Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the huge power of the garden and its little-acknowledged effects on health and wellbeing. Using contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis and compelling real-life stories, she argues that the garden is an intrinsically hopeful place and gardening is a powerful reflective activity. When we enter into the rhythms of growth, decay and regeneration, and the rituals of planting, tending, and working physically with the earth, we are also gardening our minds and exercising our thinking.


In a world where research shows the average child spends less time outside each week than a maximum-security prisoner, we need to understand the value of the outside world, and the tremendous benefit it can give. There are already horticultural projects dedicated to helping mental health, addiction, asylum seekers new to Britain, and PTSD. In this glorious book of science, insight and anecdote, Stuart-Smith shows our understanding of nature and its recuperative powers is only just beginning to flower.