The Well Gardened Mind

the notion of place in contemporary life has increasingly been reduced to a backdrop and the interaction, if there is any, tends to be of a transient nature, rather than a living relationship that might be sustaining.

The sense of physical freedom that the participants experience in the garden is accompanied by an inner sense of freedom in which the possibility of a different way of life can be glimpsed.

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.

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.

being in the presence of indoor plants or looking at scenes of nature, as opposed to urban scenes, prompted people to make decisions that showed higher levels of generosity and trust.

however much they can offer us respite, gardens also put us in touch with fundamental aspects of life.

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.

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 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