Body and Soil

British psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Sue Stuart-Smith explores the important and inextricable connection between our well being and the planet’s well being in a new book, The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature. 

She examines how a garden can cultivate caring and kindness and combat negativity in a world of digital dizziness and distractions.  With quotes from and anecdotes about Freud, Montaigne, Voltaire, and the earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, she creates a vivid picture of the indelible linkage of human life and the natural world.

Consider how her ideas resonate —whether you are a master gardener or not—in these excerpts from her evocative and expressive book.

“The garden is an imagined place as much as a real one.  People dream about their gardens and make plans for them.  Even tending a window box can open a door onto another world.”

 “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 to work with.

“The garden is a place that brings us back to the basic biological rhythms of life.  The pace of life is the pace of plants; we are forced to slow down, and the feeling of safe enclosure and familiarity helps us shift to a more reflective state of mind.”

“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 an unexpectedly take shape. At times like these, it feels as if alongside all the physical activity, I am also gardening my mind.”