“To forget how to dig the earth
and to tend the soil
is to forget ourselves.”
-Gandhi
What is a healing garden?
Healing gardens, as we call them today, have their roots in the monastic gardens of old. As varied as humanity itself, their one theme is that they are designed with healing in mind. They are filled with plants of all kinds and sizes – trees to stand anchored, waving grasses to catch the wind, and everything from moss to flowers to ferns in-between. There may be medicinal herbs and food plants. They have places for sitting, under trees and by water, perhaps. They have winding paths that take you into secluded corners where you can rest unseen by other eyes.
There is a profound rest that comes upon a body when it can truly be alone in a garden with not even a window overlooking. Especially if it is by a patch of mint.
One example of a healing garden that comes to mind is The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. In this story, the sealing of the garden coincided with the sealing of the main characters’ hearts. Sickly Collin was kept in his room, and his father so embittered by grief that he did not want to see him. It was the return of life to the garden at little Mary’s hands that brought belonging, healing, and restoration.
Nature’s message is the same the world over.
The French Impressionist painter Claude Monet found healing from depression by immersing himself in gardening. He credited nature as being the counterbalance to the driving force of his painting compulsion.
My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece. I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most is flowers. Always. My heart is forever in Giverny, perhaps I owe it to the flowers that I became a painter. -Claude Monet
The healing gardens in places like the Denver Children’s home and The Secret Garden at the Ronald McDonald house in Wisconsin are inspiring places that encourage rest and play. Touch me, the plants there seem to say. Stay awhile and drink in life with me.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Nemours Hospital are only two examples of hospitals that are attempting to incorporate healing gardens, though a bit too concreted to my wild-nature-loving eye. However, just the fact that we are beginning to understand the importance of nature in our lives is highly encouraging. A local retirement home here in my hometown designed a beautiful garden with water features, walking paths, bird feeders, and a gazebo.
For a lovely overview of healing gardens, see this article from the Penn State Extension. Longwood Gardens, a beautiful garden destination in eastern Pennsylvania that offers acres of gardens and conservatories, has also shared an article on planning your own healing garden. And for a visual experience, this Healing Gardens documentary, full of inspiring episodes showcasing real-life examples of gardens, is a wonderful resource.
Garden Dirt as Antidepressant
It’s no secret that time spent outside in the light and air, with our hands and feet connecting to the earth, has healing benefits that can be physically measured. Time spent in nature increases the levels of our happy chemical, serotonin, in the brain. It slows the heart rate and lowers blood pressure. Not surprisingly. There’s something about being surrounded by life forms that are not rushing off to do something or accomplish something – life that just IS.
And the dirt is quite healthy, so keep the gloves off. Feel the earth in your fingers.
In our overly-disinfected lives, research is showing that children who are not exposed to nature and allowed to get dirty in it are more prone to immune system deficiencies than children who grow up playing in streams and making mud pies.
As if that’s not enough, the reward of growing something for ourselves, whether food or medicine, does not stop there. Research is also showing that when we harvest food we have grown the dopamine levels in our brain rise. This article calls it a “harvesting high” and traces it back to the hunter/gatherer days of our early ancestors:
The hard work of finding and gathering food was rewarded by a hit of dopamine which ensured our survival! Seeing our homegrown food grow and then harvesting it gives us an injection of dopamine resulting in a ‘harvesting high’, which makes us feel great! -Harvst
Beauty From Bare Ground
The very act of planning a garden brings a measure of peace. Breaking barren soil, turning it and working it until it is smooth and rich and ready for seed, plants rising from the dark underbelly of the earth and bursting into light – there are so many parallels for healing in a garden. When the world seems chaotic and sad and dark, the act of bringing beauty and nourishment from bare ground, and order from chaos, brings such healing.
“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” – May Sarton
Gardening as Meditation
Meditation is a valuable practice in a life that seeks balance and wholeness. It is, to put it simply, learning to bring the mind into a place of complete silence and stillness. This is popularly done by sitting still in a quiet place. However, this may be difficult in the early stages of healing. Those walking out of deep depression may find the quiet inactivity unsettling. Gardening can be a gentle teacher, introducing this way of mind-silence as the hands work the earth.
This time becomes a healing time – a time of mental rest from a day that has been full of noise. William Martin, in his book The Parent’s Tao Te Ching, writes, “Meditation is not complicated nor esoteric. It is a natural skill, practiced in many variations. Breathe in and think Be… Breathe out and think …Still. Once you learn, teach your children You don’t have to call it mediation. Call it being still like a mountain.”
Or like I tell my boys – breathe like the trees breathe. Slowly.
In this practice we remember that we too are gardens. Cultures ancient and varied have, as their beginning point, a story of time beginning in a garden. The garden of the human being.
Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go back to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left in untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden. -Thich Nhat Hanh
Gardening as Therapy for the Earth
It’s no secret that our beautiful world is facing environmental threats that could be catastrophic. It can feel overwhelming and scary. There is much outside of our control, but raising a garden is one small thing we can do to nourish the part of the world we live in right now, right here. The modern world seems to be ever-increasing in its speed and demands and disconnect. Perhaps growing a garden is one of the things that will counter this. Wendell Berry believes it will.
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.” – Wendell Berry
The Seasons of Life and Birth
Watching the cycles of the seasons and growing times, we remember that we are so much more than one season. We see life, even in the depth of winter, and we know that life continues even when it may not seem like it is there. And we remember to breathe the way the plants and the trees breathe. Slowly.
We watch a tiny crocus rise naked through ice and snow to bloom on a February day, and we learn that there are different kinds of strength.
We watch the chaos and energy and wild extravagance of an August garden bursting with life, and we know that the seasons when we bring forth life are also wild and messy and bursting with energy. And that is as it should be.
We watch the ever-changing faces of our gardens as they swell and fade in ways that defy our Western ideals of symmetrical beauty and perpetual youth, and we learn about the beauty of fading and aging and weathering.
We watch a garden surrender to the cold winds of winter, and we learn that death is not the end of anything.
Forget what we’re told
Before we get too old,
Show me a garden that’s bursting into life.-Chasing Cars, by Snow Patrol
