Happiness at our fingertips

Reconnecting with the power of gardening. 

‘In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.’[1]

So writes the late, great neurologist Oliver Sacks. From his long experience treating patients, he noted that gardens and nature ‘were more powerful than any medication,’ concluding that ‘the effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.

Whatever your age, whatever the season, a garden (or backyard) can be a magical and transformative space. Whether you are planting, harvesting, weeding, pruning, or just relaxing among the greenery and blossoms, you are perhaps recreating your very earliest memories and experiences of connecting with nature. 

Writer and editor Diana Athill, who lived to the age of 98, took pleasure in pottering around the garden of her retirement home. ‘It connects you with what is outside yourself like few other activities, and that is the secret of happiness,’ she said.[2] 

For British novelist Julie Myerson, discovering her interest in gardening took her ‘straight back to the person I'd forgotten I once was: a kid who used to dig around at the bottom of the garden in her anorak. A girl who noticed the seasons, the calling of birds, the smell of sap on the air. Finding that person again has been one of the most intense and comforting experiences of the last few years.’[3]

When green shoots start to emerge from dark earth, we witness alchemy, triggered by sunlight, rain, and biology. ‘Making things grow has a kind of mystery to it,’ says Sue Stuart-Smith, psychiatrist and author of The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World (Harpercollins 2021), adding ‘and we can claim some of that mystery for ourselves.’

Gardening can be one of the most affirming yet heartbreaking pursuits: not every seedling thrives. All you can do is your best to help nature, and then get out of its way. As Julie Myerson observes: ‘tending a garden is a meditative, humbling experience: you can't force anything, you just have to wait. And yet every time you put something in the ground, it feels like a pronouncement of faith in the future.’

And there is more a garden can do, as writer Rebecca Solnit reminds us. ‘In an age of lies and illusions,’ she writes in Orwell’s Roses (Granta 2021), ‘the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.’

Happiness at our fingertips. Healing and hope, the dignity of death and the beauty of renewal: all these bloom in a garden. When did you last spend some time in one?