The Well Gardened Mind

This mixed lifestyle could more properly be called hunting-gathering-cultivating.

The differentiation between a retreat on the one hand and a refuge on the other is important because they have different psychological implications. A retreat is a defensive move, generally in a backwards direction. A refuge is a stopping point, a place of respite from which we can emerge feeling strengthened and able to re-engage with life.

the nature of contemporary life, with its screens and computers, means we are dependent on the left hemisphere’s mode of attention processing about 80 per cent of the time. He believes that this imbalance is linked to the rise of anxiety and depression, as well as contributing to more generalised feelings of emptiness and mistrust. This is because

By placing ‘greenness’ at the heart of her thinking, Hildegard recognised that people can only thrive when the natural world thrives. She understood that there is an inescapable link between the health of the planet and human physical and spiritual health, which is why she is increasingly regarded as a forerunner of the modern ecological movement.

Gardening is, of course, an intrinsically hopeful act and it is a reparative act but, particularly in the world today, it can also be a defiant act.

the urge to explore that it engenders is intellectual as well as physical.

So the garden was both a physical setting for the house as well as a setting for the mind; one that was all the more significant for having been shaped by his and Dorothy’s own hands.

Gardens that have vistas as well as protected spaces within them satisfy our need for prospect and refuge. Much as physical or emotional holding can be protective and open at the same time, so a garden can offer a feeling of safe enclosure without entrapment.

the sanctity of manual labour.

He regarded the plants in the garden as his ‘gentle guides’ because they showed him a different way of being.