However much we are distracted by the neon lights and drawn to the city’s humming, thumping energy, somewhere in the deep ancestral recesses of our minds an alarm bell rings, signalling to us this is not a good place to be.

Although gardening is a creative act, it is not always held in high regard. Sometimes it is trivialised as a ‘nice’ hobby or an unnecessary luxury; equally it may be relegated to a form of lowly manual labour. The source of this polarisation can be traced back to the Bible. The garden of Eden is as beautiful as it is abundant and until Adam and Eve

On Not Being Able to Paint.

Caring for plants is intrinsically a mindful activity, whereas care that is carried out in an inattentive or mindless way is not true care. To practise true care means becoming receptive to another as we tune in and focus on the needs of someone or something outside ourselves.

It may seem like a contradiction to talk of foraging in your own garden, but little bits of wilderness constantly creep into any garden and even on a small patch, the pleasures of wandering and finding feel more like gathering than harvesting.

The archaeologist Andrew Sherratt came up with a particularly neat reversal of the conventional narrative about cultivation, by characterising the path that people took from gardening to farming as one that started with growing luxuries and ended with growing commodities. The focus on growing life-enhancing plants means that from the very

gardens have a powerful levelling effect; they offer an environment in which social pecking orders and racial divides become much less relevant. Working with the earth seems to foster an authentic connection between people, free from the posturing and prejudice that characterises so much human-to-human relating.

Gardening itself can be a form of ritual. It transforms external reality and gives rise to beauty around us but it also works within us, through its symbolic meaning. A garden puts us in touch with a set of metaphors that have profoundly shaped the human psyche for thousands of years – metaphors so deep they are almost hidden within our thinking.

Winnicott’s conceptualisation of transitional processes was to some extent influenced by Wordsworth’s understanding of how we inhabit the world through a combination of perception and imagination.