Flower power: the benefits of green therapy

I fell in love with someone other than my husband four years ago. We had watched one another for some time before we became intimate. I knew their every curve and angle before I even touched them. And I suppose, in a way, they knew mine. We lived side by side for years, me too scared to make the first move in case… What? There was no connection? They withered under my clumsy, unfamiliar touch? And then, one day, just like that, I headed out to introduce myself.

That’s how I see my garden, by the way, as a living, breathing thing. It has, by turns, comforted, seduced, teased and angered me – often all at once. It is familiar and yet unknowable. Capricious in the way the most intoxicating lovers always are. And yet it has been my salvation.

I needed a hobby. That was what the life coach had said. It’s true, I had slowly become overwhelmed by work. I have always worked longer and harder than anyone I know, and hobbies are not something I’m good at. I need to feel that I am moving forward. That everything is a project to be completed. And so, one day, as I stood looking out of the window, in the house we had lived in for all of three years, it hit me. Gardening would be my ‘thing’.

When we bought the house, the garden was billed as ‘mature’, which is basically a euphemism for overgrown and unloved. The first day, I spent seven hours digging up the flowerbeds. They were filled with hundreds of amphibious-looking roots and small, knobbly things that I presumed were weeds but now know were bulbs and tubers. The following year, the beds stayed dark and empty.

I had a go at tree surgery, lopping off huge, muscular branches that obscured views and shrouded the garden in shade. I was very proud of myself until said trees, traumatised by my butchery, refused to bear any leaves for two years. This is how it went: me reckless and over-eager; the garden baring its teeth in response. Haste and force, the very things I had relied on in the corporate world to get ahead, were not welcome in the garden. It needed a softer touch and a slower pace.

So I started to read some books. I watched Gardeners’ World. I listened to gardening podcasts and earwigged conversations between those with dirt under their fingernails at the garden centre. I bought a box of bulbs and planted each one in the beds I had ransacked years earlier. And then I waited and waited for the tiny green shoots to push their way through the frozen earth. 

It was there, in the waiting and the planting and the toiling, that I found true peace. They talk about finding headspace, but clearing your mind of the million pieces of clutter it has accumulated over the days/months/years is impossible. What gardening does is takes you away from your head completely. The garden requires labour and love and patience in, I suppose, the same way a child does. And in that way, it offers you the greatest escape of all: a break from you. Because sometimes, in order to get perspective on your own life, you need distance from it. (And if you don’t have a garden, don’t worry, indoor plants offer the same opportunity. Truth be told, they are notoriously harder to care for, pedantic as they are to even the slightest fluctuation in their environment.)

These days, gardening has become the best sort of friend. The one who soothes you when you’re jangled. The one who pulls the reins when you’re charging ahead. The one who knows that when you need to escape the buzz of your own head once in a while, they will be there to help you do just that.

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The books, podcast and film that helped Farrah understand her garden better.

• READ: Clematis by Christopher Lloyd, which is a classic. Also, The Gardens of Bunny Mellon by Linda Holden.
• LISTEN: The Desert Island Discs archive on the BBC Sounds app. There’s an excellent one with Monty Don.
• WATCH: The Gardener (Amazon Prime), a stirring documentary about one man and the garden he created.
  

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Photography: Greg Cox
Styling: Jeanne Botes