The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.

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 ca

The idea that we can cultivate the soul or the self like a garden goes back to ancient times

Indeed, for any of us to benefit from seeing things grow, we need to experience the growth cycle throughout the seasons.

he described gardening as an activity ‘that brings the individual close to the soil and close to Mother Nature, close to beauty, close to the inscrutable mystery of growth and development’. He recognised that an important kind of intimacy can be experienced in the garden and it is an intimacy that is not about other people.

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 wh

The urban environment skews us towards indifference and suspicion. The instincts that promote survival of the self come to the fore, and our thinking follows suit. The presence of nature, on the other hand, helps us to feel more connected to the world around us. Rather like putting on a different pair of spectacles, we see the world slightly differ