"In Gardening, we step beyond the dictation of time." novelist Penelope Lively wrote from her experience of how gardening releases humans from burdens, in this case, the unrelenting passage of time. 

"I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention..." echoes psychiatrist Sue Stuart-Smith in her book The Well Gardened Mind, a generous study of how gardening nurtures and nourishes our inner space. 

I discovered the pleasure of wandering through the garden with a free-floating attention, registering how the plants were changing, growing, ailing, and fruiting. Gradually the way I thought about mundane tasks such as weeding, hoeing and watering changed; I came to see that it is important not so much to get them done, but to let oneself be fully involved in the doing of them. Watering is calming long as you are not in a hurry - and, strangely, when it is finished, you end up feeling refreshed, like the plants themselves.

My May garden in bloom. "The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood." Emerson wrote about our connection to nature.

Stuart-Smith studied English literature at the University of Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She is currently the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire and teaches at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London.

Stuart-Smith's long career in psychotherapy has been well-lived alongside some herbaceous borders created by her husband, landscape architect and gardener Tom Stuart-Smith. Since opening his eponymous firm in 1998, Mr. Stuart-Smith has imagined and shaped gardens worldwide, including The Hepworth-Wakefield Garden, which gives movement and spirit to sculptor Barbara Hepworth's critical works.

Stuart-Smith writes:

A garden gives you a protected physical space which helps increase your sense of mental space and gives you quiet, so you can hear your thoughts. The more you immerse yourself in working with your hands, the more free you are internally to sort feelings out and work them through. These days, I turn to gardening as calming and decompressing my mind. Somehow, the jangle of competing thoughts inside my head clears and settles as the weed bucket fills up. Ideas that have been lying dormant come to the surface, and barely-formed thoughts sometimes come together and unexpectedly take shape. At times like these, it feels like I am also gardening my mind alongside all the physical activity.

"To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for color, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed," wrote Jekyll in her culture-shifting gardening book.

From the reflection of how a single tree positively correlates to well being to a bright observation that individuals seek the sun whenever possible (no one lunches in the basement, for example, but out in a park), Stuart-Smith demonstrates how humans significantly rely on aspects of cultivated nature to restore their tired, over-burdened minds.

It makes me think of American President John Adams, longing for his Boston plot from the Continental Congress, or Henry David Thoreau setting about planting beans near Walden Pond as the singular focus of his life.

 My garden - sometimes writing - shed.

For many of us, Gardening is the antidote to urban and domestic life, not merely its embellishment.

Cities are crowded, and our minds are crowded, too, but a visit to a park can help expand our sense of mental space. We can take a step back, think more clearly and return from our excursion feeling freer and less constrained by whatever was impinging on us.

 Vertical garden on a London construction site. One of the gardens I pass on the way to work.

For most of us, our need is not merely to step into garden space but to dialogue: "I see gardening as an iteration..." Stuart-Smith reflects on humans' constant harmonization with plants, soil, and water.

I've written about the solitary nature of gardeners, but in reality, they are in constant communion. An unspoken language of plant, water, and seeds - organic and inorganic life forms that, as Stuart-Smith describes, contain all the genetic code to empower life.   A seed seems to be the very starting point of life in a garden's hands, but really, it is already a system that activates the real starting points (cells!). From winged maple seeds to papery cobea, they are dormant systems all.

I think of neurologist Oliver Sack's lifelong pursuit to understand individuals with severe brain traumas and how it led him to a patient without the ability to form memory. This patient lived in a constant tormenting present, gathering data he had lost seconds before. His fragmented verbal personality was only relieved in the hospital's garden.

 Erigeron slipped its mulched harness, as Erigeron always does.

Stuart-Smith illustrates how this mental calming has worked. At the most superficial level, plants are safe from sudden movements, and green light is more accessible for our mind to process. More complexly, cultivated nature provides a smooth platform for memory formation and psychological anchoring.   Read more in my study of how we anchor or memories in space to make them real or Penelope Lively's fluid narrative on memory as one of the most stabilizing forces of our life.

Our autobiographical timeline is composed of memories but our sense of time elapsed is often hazy. This is because memory has a much stronger relationship to place than to the chronology of the clock. It is why we are often unsure about how long ago something happened but invariably know where it happened. Our remote ancestors living in the wild needed to map terrain and recall the whereabouts of resources, so there are evolutionary reasons why location might function like an index card to the memory system. Consequently, over the course of our lives, places become intimately woven into our autobiographical narrative and sense of self.

My life could be measured in little steps and giant leaps to acquire more land to garden, led by an idea to leave space a little better than we found it (for the bees, at the very least). If just one of my readers buys a pot, clears a sill, reads the language of flowers, or throws water on an accidentally-sprouted onion, that is a measure of success.

 Future gardener cultivating the gardener's temperament.

Accompany a life-affirming read of The Well Gardened Mind with Stuart-Smith's collection of living artwork, well worth a lingering visit. Or trot to the Serge Hill Project, a private/community endeavor featuring a plant library and community vegetable crop managed by the Stuart-Smiths.