Therapy-Based Gardening

How This Simple Act Can Alter Your Perspective On Self-Care

Writing this came about through my personal experiences of how gardening began to change my own self-esteem and self-worth values during my recovery from Covid-19. After contracting Covid-19 I fell into a massive slump with my mood. It is true to say that, whilst in hospital being cared for, it is scary enough ‘when you are a nurse on the opposite side of the bed,’ but I don’t recall much of that time receiving oxygen, and being incapable of doing much for myself. But I am thankful.

But Thankful For Being So Ill?

No of course not. Nobody wants to be ill. But those weeks taught me that I am vulnerable just like every one of us in our world. And when I was eventually discharged home, I was able to rediscover ‘what life had to offer around me.’ My experience & knowledge that working in psychiatry had given to me over the years, brought home to me that, in teaching patients the skills of mindfulness, it does not necessarily mean that you do them yourself in your own home life outside of work.

So when faced with my long road to recovery, I retaught myself these skills, that I had so long before been teaching my very own mental health patients.

I have added a selection of relevant articles written by myself regarding how mental health professionals are seen by other professionals (particularly such as the likes of GP’s) below and others that I have written about pertaining to mindfulness:

Up until 2020, from the time when I contracted Covid-19 from work. After time spent in hospital and oxygen therapy, I was finally on the other side of the hospital bed. I was no longer the nurse helping others in a bed. I made attempts after 7-months of recovery of going back to work on phased returns and adaptations to help my work life easier to manage, but it proved too much to deal with. In March of 2021, I finally needed to call it a day, after I had spent many years talking to people about how important their own health was to them; it was not long before the same talk was being had with me by other professionals caring for me. And so, and with much to my regret too, I understood that my time had come to resign on ill-health grounds from work,

And this is exactly what home had in store for me:

Okay, so from the very outset of taking a good long hard stare at my garden, I understood my limits came to a grinding halt when it came to chopping trees down, which were so desperately in need of being chopped because they were literally stealing the natural light and denying the bramble and shrubs under the trees, any share of the sun’s rays (and remember this being in Britain, there is a major scarcity of the sun!!)

Anyone having studied Biology at school will recall that plants, shrubs, flowers, and the lists go on, natural light is needed to establish photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process by which every plant making its own food.

The support from the area parks team actually found a wall behind all the trees and a very tangled wire fencing that had been entwined within it. A log quite clearly showed part of one of the trees which had literally grown through the fencing itself; something I never knew trees could do until now!

And this then presented me with a new way forward, one of many since that moment; Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT.) Definitely a topic I had trained in and taught the skills to many patients over the years with.

In the past few years as part of my last post and counting toward meeting my Nurses & Midwifery Council (NMC) revalidation requirements, I had attended and completed a week-long university face-to-face participatory course on DBT (Train the Trainer) qualification. I recalled the part of the training all about Mindfulness. This is where you can learn in a more focused manner, which involves the person making a special effort to notice what’s happening in the present moment in time (within your mind, body, and in your surroundings.)

Simple day-to-day things such as:

taking time out from your busy schedules to smell the flowers or roses growing within your garden

yes even paying attention to the grass, how green does it appear, touch the blades growing, how do they feel, even smell to you

what does the sky look like, does it appear bright, cheerful, or grey and angry around you

look up at the varied forms of each cloud, their colour, depth, can you form images within your mind of just what they conjure up in your mind’s eye

breathing exercises can be easily carried out in your garden, allowing you to smell the very air around you, allowing you to tune into what nature is surrounding you, and has to offer you

just how does all this make feel when you do these things?

And the list can carry on, it becomes more about finding out where you suddenly fit into life. So as you can see, mindfulness has many avenues that can help you manage and learn to become at peace with yourself, it has turned out that writing on Medium (thanks go to Ev Williams and Benny Lim) has proven a good mindfulness technique for me, enabling me to discuss just how my garden makes me feel & have a platform to explore it on & to share what I have learned with others, in being able to support others too.

So to the garden, it is… and our garden has been shouting out my name for many years believe me! I find that now I am not working, it causes stress in itself living off the UK Government benefits system (well, the less said about that, the better!)

Our garden has my time now (sorry I should more accurately say, working 12-hour shifts had previously owned my time.) And my god, the garden(s) are one hell of a challenge to take on after so many years of neglect. As I cannot walk well, and cannot stand for long periods, my wife takes my disability chair into the garden for me to rest on when I need to. It is beautiful to mow the grass down, get rid of those nettles that used to keep shouting mockingly,

‘Hi there I’m the nettles, we’re taking over mate!’

Just to simply sit in the garden and ‘watch the world go by,’ with a cup of coffee in my hand, being able to have a long meaningful chat with my wife who has always been there for me throughout my nursing career, never wavering from her endless love and care. I would now at this point in my life never ask for anything or anyone more than I do now.

So as you can see, for any one of us who find themselves in this position, there is always hope through the dark times in our lives. Therapy knowledge or going through therapy can support you, and help you discover how to access your inner peace within yourself when you really need it to,

‘get in touch with your inner self, and help you find the real you.’

Being able to take up tackling our gardens at home, has helped me to help myself toward building both my inner mental health & my physical health too.

It has become a project within me that holds greater importance for my own healing now, after the devastating attack that Covid-19 left me with, ending a psychiatric nursing career that has spanned 1989–2021.

It has been purely coincidental for me to have taken up this project as I said above to ‘ help myself… my inner mental health & my physical health,’ and that the gardening tools have been purchased through Fiskars but, I can only admit truthfully in saying that, having purchased many tools from this company, both my wife & I have discovered just how strong, hard-wearing and durable their products are, being left with my physical disabilities, their tools are easy to use too (this is not in any way me sponsoring Fiskars) just me honestly saying that I would highly recommend them to anyone who wants to take on the forest in your garden! Simple, honest & plain speaking from the start.

🟡 Now for the current moment at least, because the good old British weather pattern is extremely predictable when it comes to rain, rain has temporarily stopped play (excuse the tennis pun) in our garden project.🟡

I suppose that all I have left to say is that when the rain stops (and I cannot stress the word ‘when’) there are still many tools that are left needing to buy, to complete our garden project. A garden project that we are both proud of and which provides limitless areas in rediscovering nature & mindfulness activities, to help every one of us through the times in our lives that we all struggle with. And of course, this does take money, an evil necessity in our modern-day lives today.

But thankfully, in addition, I have rediscovered my love for writing too, enabling mindfulness to be felt and utilized in writing areas; even when the British weather system stops you from your garden project for the time being.

Try this all out for yourselves and see what good you can achieve for your own mental & physical health.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please feel free to engage with me here on Medium and tell me what you think. I hope my words in this article have helped.

Or of course, you might like to follow me on Twitter @JonathanDTowne1