A Review of The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature by Sue Stuart-Smith

I just returned from a trip to the food market. It was late in the day. On the drive home, the snow-covered landscape, glowing dimly in the twilight, lifted me up. I felt at ease seeing the land at rest, thinking about the things going on beneath the snow cover, about what happens there during the long wait until spring. As I moved through the silent landscape, I was comforted. I felt a sense of serenity and well-being. I think this is what Sue Stuart-Smith is writing about in her new book, The Well-Gardened Mind, or rather, one of the important things.

Judging from its reception, and Stuart-Smith’s own comments, this is a book about the therapeutic benefits of gardens and gardening. But I read the book more broadly, much more as a meditation on the meanings and purposes of nature and gardens—from the earliest civilizations, and in widely varied cultures—to the present day. I hope it will be recognized for the full scope of its accomplishment.

photo credit Sue Stuart-Smith

Stuart-Smith writes with ease about many things not directly relatable to therapeutic uses of gardens, in these passages giving us enlightening context and helping us understand why gardens and nature are beneficial. She explores the origins of gardening in prehistory and the reasons for believing gardens preceded development of agriculture. She describes Montaigne’s early fear of death and how he learned to take “the strangeness out of death,” came to accept death as “more ordinary,“ almost as a commonplace, as simply a part of the process of life. “When it came to contemplating how his own life might end,” she writes, “Montaigne hoped that it would happen in his garden: ‘I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.’” She writes about how different were the attitudes toward the natural world among indigenous peoples, such as the Maori, and white European colonists. The Maori closely associated cultivation of the earth with religion, while the European colonists viewed agriculture strictly as a utilitarian, economic undertaking. The Maori’s “intimate relationship between cultivating the earth and religion would have been anathema to the colonialists,” she explains. “The desacralization of the natural world brought with it the idea that humans can control nature, and gave rise to a loss of respect for the earth, a deep misapprehension that continues to plague us today.”

Her attention to what might be called the “philosophical” side of gardens and gardening imbues the more therapeutic aspects of the book with a richness that enhances understanding—that suggests the need to “resacralize” our relationship to nature.

In the five years Stuart-Smith took to write the book, she amassed an immense amount of research and performed interviews in several countries to explore the effects of gardens and gardening on patients in hospitals and care facilities, prisoners allowed to participate in gardening programs, the effects of gardens on people with mental, intellectual, and physical disabilities. She presents extensive evidence of the extraordinary benefits of such programs. What is new in this book is the way in which she extends her inquiries into cultural history, archaeology, psychoanalysis, literature and other fields not usually considered in therapeutic inquiry.

This is a wise, deeply felt, and thoroughly researched book about the meaning of gardens to all people in the many different circumstances of life. It can’t simply be relegated to a category of books about the benefits of gardening in treating mental illness, trauma, or stress—though the therapeutic value of the natural world of plants and the processes of caring for them is certainly a major concern of this work.

Near the end of The Well-Gardened Mind, she writes about the difficulty in our frenetic culture bridging the gap between “’doing’ on the one hand and ‘being’ on the other.” Our high-speed world demands we be highly productive; it values and rewards only productivity. The value of being-in-the-world, taking the time simply to observe and take care of the intangible aspects of living-in-the-world, simply isn’t recognized and, if it is, usually is judged a waste of time, as “unproductive.”

“As we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care, but a caring stance is not something that is actively promoted in contemporary life.”

The following story comes from Stuart-Smith’s early days as a doctor. Listen to her describe how these two worlds merge: “… a man in his late seventies was on his way to emergency having suffered a cardiac arrest … we waited while the clock on the wall ticked precious minutes away. Then the room was propelled into action as the ambulance crew burst in ... The stretcher they carried bore a man in the winter of life … death had found him mowing his lawn … his jacket, trousers, and wellington boots were all covered in fine lawn clippings … some of the greenery fell to the floor and then spread itself further as his clothes were cut off his body. The smell of mown grass filled the air while we focused on the strict and briskly timed routine with which resuscitation attempts are conducted … It must have seemed like an ordinary day with no foreboding of the swift, cruel severance to come. When those lawn clippings scattered themselves in the white, sterile room that day, it seemed to me that two versions of death were juxtaposed in front of our eyes. With its high-tech screens and beeping machines, this was a space equipped to conquer the forces that extinguish life, and we were treating the body as a failing machine, but it is to earth that we ultimately return, and the green blades of grass asserted the inescapable naturalness of the fact. We have separated ourselves from nature to such an extent that we forget we are part of a vast and living continuum, that the atoms in our bodies are derived from the products of the earth and that in time they will slip back into the chain of life. This continuity between us and the natural world is not only in death; even as we go about our day-to-day lives, our skin is turning to dust and the carbon dioxide we expire is contributing to the growth of plants.”

Whether Stuart-Smith is writing about Freud or Montaigne, or about a gardening program for inmates at the notorious Riker’s Island penal colony in New York City, the stories—some literary in origin, some about social programs aiming for a rehabilitative outcome—are all about relationships between people and gardens. What she has accomplished is to greatly broaden the scope of her endeavor, to see the common humanity among vastly different people, in many parts of the world, living lives of almost inconceivable diversity; breaking down barriers and prejudicial distinctions; ignoring the walls we’ve erected between scientists and artists and prisoners; and revealing the profound importance of gardens, nature, and greenness to human lives—to all human lives.

Human beings have been remaking their lives after inconsolable personal loss, natural disaster, war, and immense destruction since before the beginnings of human civilization. Gardens have been a comfort throughout this long history of despair and recovery, but today, as the human population gathers into enormously large, dense cities, we have lost the closeness and access to nature that has done so much for us in the past. Stuart-Smith has written a remarkable book about how nature and gardens help us live with the stresses of our increasingly complex, difficult times. Many other books on the benefits of gardening have been written, but none, I think, does it with such depth and understanding, as this one.

This book may become a modern garden classic.

photo credit Harry Stuart-Smith