The Well Gardened Mind

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Sue Stuart-Smith 2020

Cover illustration by Jaya Miceli

Sue Stuart-Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008100735

Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008100728

Version: 2021-01-12

Dedication

For Tom

Epigraph

‘All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience.’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1. Beginnings

2. Green Nature: Human Nature

3. Seeds and Self-Belief

4. Safe Green Space

5. Bringing Nature to the City

6. Roots

7. Flower Power

8. Radical Solutions

9. War and Gardening

10. The Last Season of Life

11. Garden Time

12. View From the Hospital

13. Green Fuse

Picture Section

Notes on Sources

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

BEGINNINGS

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

LONG BEFORE I wanted to be a psychiatrist, long before I had any inkling that gardening might play an important role in my life, I remember hearing the story of how my grandfather was restored after the First World War.

He was born Alfred Edward May, but was always known as Ted. Little more than a boy when he joined the Royal Navy, he trained as a Marconi wireless operator and became a submariner. In the spring of 1915 during the Gallipoli campaign, the submarine he was serving on ran aground in the Dardanelles. Most of the crew survived only to be taken prisoner. Ted kept a tiny diary in which he documented the early months of his captivity in Turkey but his subsequent time in a series of brutal labour camps is not recorded. The last of these was a cement factory on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, from which he eventually escaped by sea in 1918.

Ted was rescued and treated on a British hospital ship, where he recovered just enough strength to attempt the long journey home overland. Eager to be reunited with his fiancée, Fanny, whom he had left behind as a fit young man, he turned up on her doorstep in a battered old raincoat with a Turkish fez on his head. She barely recognised him for he weighed little more than six stone and had lost all of his hair. The 4,000-mile journey had, he told Fanny, been ‘horrendous’. When he underwent the naval medical examination, his malnutrition was found to be so advanced that he was given only a few months to live.

But Fanny nursed him faithfully, feeding him tiny amounts of soup and other sustenance on an hourly basis, so that gradually he was able to digest food again. Ted began the slow process of regaining his health and he and Fanny were married soon after. In that first year, he would sit for hours stroking his bald head with two soft brushes, willing his hair to grow back. When it finally did, it was prolific, but it was white.

Love and patient determination enabled Ted to defy the gloomy prognosis he had been given but his prison camp experiences stayed with him and his terrors were worst at night. He was especially afraid of spiders and crabs because they had crawled all over the prisoners as they tried to sleep. For years to come, he could not bear to be alone in the dark.

The next phase of Ted’s recovery began in 1920 when he signed up for a year-long course in horticulture, one of many initiatives set up in the postwar years with the aim of rehabilitating ex-servicemen who had been damaged by the war. After this he travelled to Canada, leaving Fanny at home. He went in search of new opportunities, in the hope that working the land might further improve his physical and mental strength. At that time the Canadian government was running programmes to encourage ex-servicemen to migrate and thousands of men who had returned from the war made that long Atlantic crossing.

Ted laboured on the wheat harvest in Winnipeg and then found more settled employment as a gardener on a cattle ranch in Alberta. Fanny joined him for some of the two years he spent there but for whatever reason their dream of starting a new life in Canada did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, Ted returned to England a stronger, fitter man.

A few years later, he and Fanny bought a smallholding in Hampshire where Ted kept pigs, bees and hens, and grew flowers, fruit and vegetables. For five years during the Second World War, he worked at the Admiralty wireless station in London; my mother remembers his pigskin suitcase, which travelled up with him on the train, packed full of home-slaughtered meat and home-grown vegetables. He and the suitcase would then return carrying supplies of sugar, butter and tea. She relates with some pride how the family never had to eat margarine during the war and that Ted even grew his own tobacco.

I remember his good humour and warmth of spirit, a warmth that emanated from a man who seemed to my childish eyes to be robust and at ease with himself. He was not intimidating and did not wear his traumas on his sleeve. He spent hours tending his garden and his greenhouse and was almost always attached to a pipe with his tobacco pouch never far away. Ted’s long and healthy life – he lived into his late seventies – and his reconciliation to some of the appalling abuses he experienced, is attributed in our family mythology to the restorative effects of gardening and working the land.

Ted died suddenly when I was twelve from an aneurysm that ruptured while he was out walking his much-loved Shetland sheepdog. The local paper ran an obituary entitled: ‘Once youngest submariner dies’. It described how Ted had been reported dead twice during the First World War and that when he and a group of other prisoners escaped from the cement factory, they had lived for twenty-three days on water alone. The obituary’s closing words document his love of gardening: ‘He devoted much of his leisure time to the cultivation of his extensive garden and achieved fame locally as the grower of several rare orchids.’

Somewhere inside her, my mother must have drawn on this when my father’s death, in his late forties, left her a relatively young widow. In the second spring afterwards she found a new home and took on the task of restoring a neglected cottage garden. Even then, in my youthful, self-preoccupied state, I noticed that alongside the digging and weeding, a parallel process of reconciling herself to her loss was taking place.

At that stage of my life, gardening was not something I thought I would ever devote much time to. I was interested in the world of literature and was intent on embracing the life of the mind. As far as I was concerned gardening was a form of outdoor housework and I would no more have plucked a weed than baked a scone or washed the curtains.

My father had been in and out of hospital during my university years and he died just as I started my final year. The news came by phone in the early hours one morning and as soon as dawn broke I walked out into the quiet Cambridge streets, through the park and down to the river. It was a bright, sunny October day and the world was green and still. The trees and the grass and the water were somehow consoling and in those peaceful surroundings, I found it possible to acknowledge to myself the awful reality, that beautiful as the day was, my father was no longer alive to see it.

Perhaps this green and watery place reminded me of happier times and of the landscape that had first made an impression on me as a child. My father kept a boat on the Thames and when my brother and I were small, we spent many holidays and weekends on the water, once making an expedition up to the river’s source, or as near to it as we could get. I remember the stillness of the early morning mists, the feeling of freedom playing in the summer meadows and fishing with my brother, in what was then our favourite pastime.

During my last few terms at Cambridge, poetry took on a new emotional significance. My world had irrevocably changed and I clung to verses that spoke of the consolations of nature and the cycle of life. Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot were both sustaining, but above all I turned to Wordsworth, the poet who himself had learned:

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity …

Grief is isolating and it is no less so when it is a shared experience. A loss that devastates a family generates a need to lean on each other but at the same time, everyone is bereft, everyone is in a state of collapse. There is an impulse to protect each other from too much raw emotion and it can be easier to let feelings surface away from people. Trees, water, stones and sky may be impervious to human emotion but they are not rejecting of us either. Nature is unperturbed by our feelings and in there being no contagion, we can experience a kind of consolation that helps assuage the loneliness of loss.

In the first few years that followed my father’s death, I was drawn towards nature, not in gardens, but by the sea. His ashes had been committed near his family home on the south coast, in the waters of the Solent, a busy channel full of boats and ships, but it was on the long solitary beaches of north Norfolk, with barely a boat in sight, that I found greatest solace. The horizons were the widest I had ever seen. It felt like the edge of the known world and seemed as close to him as I could be.

Having studied Freud for one of my exam papers, I developed an interest in the workings of the mind. I gave up my plan to do a PhD in literature and decided I would train to be a doctor. Then, in the third year of my medical training, I married Tom for whom gardening was a way of life. I decided that if he loved it, then I would too but if I’m honest, I was still a garden sceptic. Gardening seemed at that point to be another chore that had to be done, although it was nicer (as long as the sun was shining) to be outdoors rather than in.

A few years later, along with our tiny baby Rose, we moved to some converted farm buildings close to Tom’s family home at Serge Hill in Hertfordshire. Over the next few years Rose was joined by Ben and Harry while Tom and I hurled ourselves into making a garden from scratch. The Barn, as we had named our new home, was surrounded by an open field and its position on a north-facing hill exposed to the winds meant that above all, we needed shelter. We carved out some plots from the stony field around us, planting trees and hedges and making enclosures of wattle fencing as well as labouring over the ground to improve it. None of this could have happened without an enormous amount of help and encouragement from Tom’s parents and a number of willing friends. When we held stone-picking parties, Rose along with her grandparents, aunts and uncles, joined in the task of filling up endless buckets of rocks and pebbles that needed to be carted away.

I had been physically and emotionally uprooted and needed to rebuild my sense of home but still, I was not particularly conscious that gardening might play a part in helping me put down roots. I was much more aware of the garden’s growing significance in our children’s lives. They began to make dens in the bushes and spent hours inhabiting imaginary worlds of their own making, so the garden was a fantasy place and a real place at the same time.

Tom’s creative energy and vision drove our garden making forward and it wasn’t until our youngest, Harry, was a toddler that I finally started growing plants myself. I became interested in herbs and devoured books about them. This new area of learning led to experiments in the kitchen and in a little herb garden that by then had become ‘mine’. There were some gardening disasters, unleashing a creeping borage and a tenacious soapwort amongst them, but eating food flavoured with all sorts of home-grown herbs was life enhancing and from there, it was a short step to growing vegetables. The thrill I felt at this stage was all about produce!

At this point, I was in my mid-thirties, working as a junior psychiatrist for the NHS. In giving me something to show for my efforts, gardening provided a counterpoint to my professional life, where I was engaged with the much more intangible properties of the mind. Working on the wards and in clinics was predominantly an indoor life but gardening pulled me outdoors.

I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, fruiting. Gradually the way I thought about mundane tasks such as weeding, hoeing and watering changed; I came to see that it is important not so much to get them done, but to let oneself be fully involved in the doing of them. Watering is calming – as long as you are not in a hurry – and, strangely, when it is finished, you end up feeling refreshed, like the plants themselves.

The biggest gardening buzz I got back then, and still get now, is from growing things from seed. Seeds give no hint of what is to come, and their size bears no relation to the dormant life within. Beans erupt dramatically, not with much beauty, but you can feel their thuggish vigour right from the start. Nicotiana seeds are so fine, like particles of dust, you can’t even see where you’ve sown them. It seems improbable they will ever do anything, let alone give you clouds of scented tobacco-plant flowers, and yet they do. I can feel how new life creates an attachment from the way I find myself coming back almost compulsively to check on my seeds and seedlings; going out to the greenhouse, holding my breath as I enter, not wanting to disrupt anything, the stillness of life just coming into being.

Fundamentally, there is no arguing with the seasons when you are gardening – although you can get away with postponing things a little – I’ll sow those seeds or plant out those plugs next weekend. There comes a point when you realise that a delay is about to become a missed opportunity, a lost possibility, but like jumping into a flowing river, once you have your seedlings tucked up in the soil, you are carried along by the energy of the earthly calendar.

I particularly love gardening in early summer, when the growth force is at its strongest and there is so much to get in the ground. Once I’ve started I don’t want to stop. I carry on in the dusk till it’s almost too dark to see what I’m doing. As I finish off, the house is glowing with light and its warmth draws me back inside. The next morning when I steal outdoors, there it is – whatever patch I was working on has settled into itself overnight.

Of course, there is no way of gardening without experiencing ruined plans. Moments when you step outside in anticipation only to be faced with the sad remains of lovely young lettuces or lines of ruthlessly stripped kale. It has to be acknowledged that the mindless eating habits of slugs and rabbits can set off bouts of helpless rage and the persistence and stamina of weeds can be very, very draining.

Not all the satisfaction in tending plants is about creation. The great thing about being destructive in the garden is that it is not only permissible, it is necessary; because if you don’t do it, you will be overrun. So many acts of garden care are infused with aggression – whether it is wielding the secateurs, double-digging the veg patch, slaughtering slugs, killing blackfly, ripping up goose grass or rooting out nettles. You can throw yourself into any of these in a wholehearted and uncomplicated way because they are all forms of destructiveness that are in the service of growth. A long session in the garden like this can leave you feeling dead on your feet but strangely renewed inside – both purged and re-energised, as if you have worked on yourself in the process. It’s a kind of gardening catharsis.

Each year as we come out of winter, the greenhouse takes a hold of me with the lure of its warmth when the world outside is chilled by the March winds. What is it that is so special about entering a greenhouse? Is it the level of oxygen in the air, or the quality of light and heat? Or simply the proximity to plants with their greenness and their scent? It is as if all the senses are heightened inside this private, protected space.

One overcast spring day last year, I was absorbed in greenhouse tasks – watering, sowing seeds, moving compost, and generally getting things done. Then the sky cleared and with the sun pouring in, I was transported to a separate world – a world of iridescent green filled with translucent leaves, the light shining through them. Droplets were scattered all over the freshly watered plants, catching the light, sparkling and luscious. Just for a moment I felt an overpowering sense of earthly beneficence, a feeling that I have retained, like a gift in time.

I sowed some sunflowers in the greenhouse that day. When I planted the seedlings out a month or so later, I thought some of them might not make it; the largest looked hopeful, but the others seemed straggly and exposed out of doors. I watched with satisfaction their growing upwards, gradually getting stronger, although I still felt they needed looking out for. Then, their growth took off and my attention moved to other more vulnerable seedlings.

I see gardening as a reiteration; I do a bit then nature does her bit, then I respond to that, and so it goes on, not unlike a conversation. It isn’t whispers or shouts or talk of any kind, but in this to-and-fro there is a delayed and sustained dialogue. I have to admit that I am sometimes the slow one to respond and can go a little quiet on it all, so it is good to have plants that can survive some neglect. And if you do take time away, the intrigue on your return is all the greater, like finding out what someone’s been up to in your absence.

One day I realised that the whole line of sunflowers were now sturdy, independent and proud with flowers coming on. When and how did you get so tall, I wondered? Soon that first hopeful seedling, still the strongest, was looking down on me from its great height with the whole wide circumference of its brilliant yellow flower. I felt quite small in its presence but there was a strangely affirmative sensation in knowing I had set its life in motion.

A month or so later, how changed they were. The bees had cleaned them out, their petals were faded and the tallest could barely support its bowed-down head. Lately so proud and now so melancholy! I had an impulse to cut the row down but I knew that if I lived with their raggedy sadness for a while, they would bleach and dry in the sun and assume a different kind of stature as they led us towards autumn.

To look after a garden involves a kind of getting to know that is somehow always in process. It entails refining and developing an understanding of what works and what does not. You have to build a relationship with the place in its entirety – its climate, its soil, and the plants growing within it. These are the realities that have to be contended with and along the way certain dreams almost always have to be given up.

Our rose garden which we started making when we first carved out some plots from the stony field, was just such a lost dream. We had filled the beds with the loveliest of old roses, such as Belle de Crécy, Cardinal de Richelieu and Madame Hardy, but it was the delicate, heady and delicious Fantin-Latour, with its flat petals, scrumpled like pale pink tissue paper, that was my favourite of all. Soft and velvety, you can nuzzle right into its flower and disappear in its scent. Little did we know then that their time with us would be so brief, but it wasn’t long before they began to baulk at the conditions they were living in. Our ground did not suit roses that well and a lack of ventilation in the wattle enclosures made matters worse. Each season became a battle to stay on top of the black spot and mildew that increasingly assailed them and, unless they were sprayed, they looked sad and sick. We were reluctant to rip them out but what is the point in gardening against nature? Of course, there is none and they had to go. Oh how I missed them and miss them still! Even though not a single rose is growing in those beds today, all long since replaced by herbaceous perennial planting, we still call it the rose garden. So the memory remains.

Neither Tom nor I liked the idea of using chemical sprays but I had a particular fear of them because of my father’s illness. When I was a child, he developed bone marrow failure of a type that is caused by exposure to an environmental toxin. It was never entirely clear what had triggered this catastrophe but amongst the possible culprits were a long-since banned pesticide lurking in the garden shed and an antibiotic prescribed for him when he had become ill on holiday in Italy the summer before. He nearly died then but the treatment he received partially reversed the damage and, although he could not be cured, it gave him another fourteen years of life. He was tall and physically strong, so it was possible for all of us to forget at times that he was living with only half-functioning marrow in his bones. The illness was always there in the background though and when his intermittent life-threatening health crises occurred, all we could do was hope.

In that phase of my childhood, there was a garden that captured my imagination much more vividly than the one at home. My mother would take my brother, myself, and any friends in tow to the Isabella Plantation, the woodland gardens in Richmond Park. As soon as we arrived, we would run off and disappear into the massive rhododendrons to enjoy the frisson of exploring and hiding in them. So dense were the bushes that it was possible for a brief time to get lost and feel the panic of separation.

There was another more unsettling element in that garden. In a small clearing, deep in the woodland, we discovered a red and yellow painted wooden caravan, which had a sign carved above the door: ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here.’ We used to dare each other to defy the injunction but the thought of relinquishing hope was not something I could possibly have taken lightly. It felt as if opening that door might release the terrible dread I dared not name into the world. In the end, like all things unknown, the fantasy proved far more powerful than the reality. One day when we finally tried the door, it revealed a simple yellow painted interior containing a wooden bunk, and, of course, nothing terrible happened.