No one doubts the physical and mental benefits of gardening, says Monty, but just why is ‘green medicine’ so good for the mind and soul?
By and large I am fairly fit and healthy,
but my knees don’t work so well nowadays and by the end of a day’s filming I am hobbling around the garden. This deterioration has been going on a long time. I remember seeing my GP about one of them some 25 years ago and he simply commented, “bad design, knees”, which, although profoundly unhelpful, turns out to be true. They work pretty well until they don’t and thereafter they are just trouble.
However, apart from this patellae problem, gardening is good for you both in mind and body. Gardening cannot reverse the depredations of age, but it can militate against them and slow them down. In a few hours’ gardening we inevitably bend, lift, haul, push, reach, lever and stretch. Muscles, ligaments, tendons and even bone density benefit. I don’t like the expression ‘Green Gym’ because I don’t want gardening to be reduced to a workout, ticked off and entered into some gizmo on one’s wrist, but work the body out it surely does.
We are increasingly realising that it is a mental workout, too. It straightens the jumble and soothes the turbulent waters of the mind. The evidence is irrefutable and much recorded, but quite what is happening to the ‘mind’ as opposed to the mechanical side of the body is, as yet, remarkably under-researched. Three cheers for the fact that doctors are prescribing gardening as ‘green medicine’, but no drug would ever be allowed anywhere near a patient if as little were known about how it worked.
Trying to analyse what exactly is going on is tricky. We all know that it makes us feel better. We all know that being in the garden, albeit just pottering about, connects us to the natural world and its rhythms, and provides a meditative awareness of the simple here and now. In short, gardening brings harmony, peace and hope into our lives. But why and how? Sorting out one’s knees is complicated enough (cf. bad design…) but knees are child’s play compared with the labyrinthine universes of the mind – and even defining what is our ‘mind’ is not straightforward, not least because the connection between the mental and the physical is visceral. There is evidence, for example, that the biome of our gut, replete with bacteria ingested from the soil of our gardens, has a strong influence on our mental health; never mind the pleasantly uplifting effect of spring blossom and the sun on our face. It is tantalisingly complex and completely fascinating.
