I have always gardened in bare feet in the warmer months, ever since I began this relationship with soil and bugs, sun and water, herbs and trees. They call it grounding, these days, a label good for Instagram posts and the self-care instructions laid out in fonts and photographs that drive the internet. I never had a word for it, just a sensation – that the diaphragm of my plantar fascae makes first contact with the earth, only a delicate skin between blood and lymph and the life of the earth beneath, the tickle of bugs and grass, wet dew. The sweet pain when a twig scratches, the kiss of damp soil, the sharpness of gravel and warmth of sun warmed garden beds. Deep connections to natural cycles.

In my most stressful times the garden is a balm. When life makes it’s demands it feels like everything is closing in on you, noisy chaos. Too much sensation. I don’t do well with too much sensation – it rattles me. I can’t bear the radio and the T.V on at the same time, clashing calender appointments, questions and queries from too many people. It’s like a tangled ball of string – I don’t have the patience to unwind it and re-ravel it, but would rather discard it. Being in the garden allows that – the noise of the world gives way to something else, more in tune with the rhythms of my body than the discordancy out in the world.

The yin and yang of nettles: they sting like crazy, but are important blood tonics. The garden contains the balance of all things.

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There’s something in the tending of things that gives life a purpose. From a larger garden to a container of herbs on a windowsill, growing things has a reason – perhaps a kind of pleasure in the fact that life can depend on you as much as you on it – a symbiosis of sorts. The spray of water, the purpose of companion planting, the careful sowing and harvest, the care of the soil. It’s a beautiful relationship and one that never hurts.

There’s a pleasure too in the accumulated knowledge. I learn by doing – I don’t retain what I read in books, or only briefly. Experience is everything. The knowledge retained is the felt knowledge, the real knowing that comes from doing, and it’s localised too – what grows here and works here might not work in other climates. The hops that grow on the shaded east side next to the lemon verbena does not do well on the western side where it’s more exposed. The brassicas like the comfrey fertiliser. The lemon tree needs to be sheltered from the frost and likes a fertiliser made of citrus rinds. The gum tree should not have been planted there as it’s roots travel too far and suck the life from the soil. The gathering of new plants, the careful consideration of their use, their value in the garden as a whole. The ones that survive, the ones that don’t. The ones that shade, the ones that make good compost, that are easy to prepare and pickle, the ones we don’t eat as much of and thus need to think about their place. None of this comes easy – it’s acquired knowledge, and there’s a curiousity and interest that keeps me going through these years of cultivation and harvest. There’s also the loveliness of attunement, to feel as if you are connected to all that is. The birch is the last tree to come to leaf, the apple is the first to blossom. The bees hibernate for the winter but when they come out they know your face, geo-locate themselves around you. Even the magpies dive at passerby but never at you – their family have been here longer than you but they know and accept you as part of their world, the braver ones begging for worms and larvae dug from the soil and thrown with a call of ‘here, mmmagggie maggie maggie’.

And then there is the moment to moment living of life, when you are so finally atuned to the task at hand, the digging and the weeding, the planting and the pruning, the making and the pruning, that each breath and body movement slips into a rhythm, a trance, and the space between the thoughts is bigger, wider, less cluttered. The breath that comes slows the heart rate, deeper exhalations calming the sympathetic nervous system.

I’ve never got anxious in the garden. Never worried. Everything just is what is is – so deeply of itself and truly honestly itself that I don’t have to second guess it or query it’s motives or defend myself. The worm twists in the palm of my hand and I place it back in the soil and it is gone. The chickens take the thrown bug and chase each other under the elder trees for it and I’m forgotten – just another breathing creature under the skirts of the sky.

Gardening for mental health? You betcha. Get out under that sky and breath, my beautiful tribes, your feet on the earth and the breeze on your skin. You are one with all that is.

How do you creatively support your mental health?

Do you take solace and pleasure in your garden, in nature, in the cycles of the whirling Earth?

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