By Christina Owen
Summer 2021. It’s my first year gardening and my first time dealing with the heartache that comes from emerging on a sunny morning to find chewed up squash seedlings and munched on bedding plants. Suddenly, my mother’s visceral hatred of slugs and snails doesn’t just seem understandable but… relatable. They’re everywhere and they want my vegetables. The vegetables I sowed as seeds and worked very hard to grow! When I’m gardening, I start to collect them up in boxes and angrily stomp with them to the park, muttering about how much I hate them and their hunger. Even releasing them somewhere else, I hope birds find and eat them. Soon I’m going out at night with a torch to hunt them out, and every morning starts with a nervous check of the garden; I wonder what’s been destroyed this time. Each time I step outside, I feel my heart rate rise and I genuinely get stressed out… and worst of all, nothing seems to work. In shame and frustration, I resort to beer traps but feel disgusted with myself for wishing harm on animals that are just doing what they need to to survive, not to mention nauseated by the yeasty smell my garden develops.
I thought gardening was meant to be good for you.
Like many other people, I relied on the natural world for solace during lockdowns, and my mental state shifted dramatically over the course of 18 months. For years I had been suffering from a quite profound depression, and during the pandemic, my partner and I started going for long walks. We’d head out and by hour three, I’d feel a clarity of thought and a sense of peace that had long been absent from my life. Combined with therapy, a more supportive work environment and stable housing situation, I managed to sort my head out and even stopped taking the medication I’d been relying on for a long time. I mention the other factors because it is important to me that a reader of this blog doesn’t think it was just being outside that did it, but a combination of factors. However, the walking felt like both a turning point and a catalyst, and I truly believe I would be in a very different place without it.
Naturally perhaps, after such a transformative experience, my mind turned to creating my own green space in which to capture a little bit of the calm from my walks at home. I was determined to get growing, so I diligently purchased peat-free compost, packets of seeds and a few pre-grown plants from a local garden centre. Weekends were suddenly taken up with sowing, window ledges became nurseries, and lunch breaks were watering opportunities as my plans started to come together. Once I started to plant things out however, I was met with a reality that all gardeners face at some point, usually sooner rather than later. My crops were delicious to more than just humans. The seedlings I had planted with such optimism were set upon by a barrage of hungry critters, and quickly my hopes for the garden turned to despair as I tried doggedly to prevent damage. Neither of my neighbours gardened so no matter how tidy my garden was, there were hiding places for my enemies on either side. I tried all the tricks I could find online – though I never touched pesticides – and didn’t notice when my fun, ‘great-for-your-mental-health’ hobby started to make me feel bad. I felt out of control, obsessed, and like I couldn’t catch a break.
In 2022, I repeated the same sequence, constantly fighting the other occupants of the garden, setting traps and escorting them off the premises. I did not enjoy it. So, last year, I tried something different. I stopped sowing the lettuce I knew would get destroyed, and instead I grew flowers, sprinkling the seeds over soil with abandon, hoping some would pop up, and they did. I grew vegetables in a temporary greenhouse and planted them out as late as I could, and I did so knowing that they might still get eaten, and some did, but also some didn’t. I let weeds poke into the gaps so that instead of bare soil I saw green, and I had a more colourful garden than I could have imagined. Instead of hunting ‘pests’ I sought out the spiders that lived on the slate path, the caterpillars enjoying the perennials, and the bees that visited the sage when it flowered. This year, I’ve neglected the garden more than I would have liked, and you can barely walk to the end without getting caught on a bramble, but it almost doesn’t matter as a three metre tall foxglove has presided over the entire space for months. It’s in this garden that I found a hedgehog last weekend. He has since had to go to a sanctuary, but his appearance brought tears to my eyes as I thought about how the mess and the insects probably played a role in bringing him to us.
Now a study from The Royal Horticultural Society has found that those who say they garden with nature and sustainability in mind feel greater health benefits than those who don’t. Whilst I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience, or the differences various gardening techniques can make in how you feel in your body, I can say with certainty that my mental health improved when I started to consider my practice as part of nature, not in opposition to it. Accepting that my garden is a space I share with my animal neighbours hasn’t stopped me from feeling sad when woodlice burrow into a much anticipated strawberry, but it has allowed me to let go of the reins a little.
One day I hope to have a much larger space in which to have a proper vegetable patch, and I’m sure that I’ll keep being challenged by unwanted visitors, but maybe then I’ll look back at this blog, and the study, and remember that it’s ok to share. It might even be better.
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