In the field of social and therapeutic horticulture, many people come to gardening as a break from stress, anxiety and fear, to break from those harmful preoccupations by participation with a more natural engagement. Gardening is the perfect distraction, the place to get lost and lose your worries but it is also a safe place to engage with mindfulness, cognitive behavioural therapeutics and other corrective methods to our harmful thought processes. It doesn’t just have to be happy place it can be contemplative too.

When I work the garden, I forget my woes but when I have woes that need attention and solving I often go to the garden to ponder over, I may weed as I go or I may just sit on the bench and get some perspective thinking in. Sometimes when you think the world is collapsing you need to flip the thought as way to asses its validity, to think ‘ok what is the evidence that the world is not collapsing’? Often just sitting in garden, with its natural rhythms, with all the knowledge of the effort it took to create and maintain, is the evidence of your personal perseverance and resilience. Here the world goes on, it is not collapsing. Here you have been useful, achieving, caring, attentive, productive – a good person. The evidence abounds.

So, as a relaxation space or contemplative space, the garden just gifts the therapeutic opportunity. Ones does not have to wait for the crisis to avail of it, but in a crisis it can help you recover and flourish.