the amount of greenery in a garden is directly related to how restorative it is.

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.

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

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.

Put simply, people behave better and connect with one another more when they are in the presence of plants and trees.

A garden is always the expression of someone’s mind and the outcome of someone’s care. In the process of gardening too, it is not possible to neatly categorise what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not-me’. When we step back from our work how can we tease apart what nature has provided and what we have contributed? Even in the midst of the action itself, it is

offenders who continued relentlessly on a criminal path characteristically had what he called a ‘condemnation’ script of their lives. By contrast, those who changed their lives managed to adopt a new more ‘generative’ narrative in which past mistakes could be integrated into a more hopeful story.

As we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care towards the world but a caring stance is not generally promoted in contemporary life. The ‘replace’ rather than ‘repair’ culture, combined with fragmented social networks and the fast pace of urban living has given rise to a set of values that devalues care. In fact, we have moved so far

Everything that happens in a garden takes place in slow time; the flowers, shrubs and trees simply get on with growing quietly at their own pace and so it is with people.