The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature

Product Description

One of Garden & Gun’s Favorite Books of 2020

A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it.
The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think. Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic,
The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives.

Review

“A psychiatrist and gardening devotee explores the mental health benefits that come with tending a plot. Something we can all use right now.” 

—People

“Sue Stuart-Smith seeks to go beyond the truism that getting out in the garden is good for you.” 

—The New Yorker

“How reassuring . . . to read Sue Stuart-Smith, a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, extolling the impact of nature and gardens on mental health and spiritual recovery.” 

—Wall Street Journal

“Examines how being disconnected from nature has negatively affected our mental health and how gardening can help to reconnect to nature . . . passionate and thoughtful.” 

—Medium

“A beautifully articulated argument for the benefits of gardens and gardening—and nature in general—on physical and mental health.” 

—AARP

“[Stuart-Smith] delivers a thoroughly researched text based on her deep and wide reading about the history of gardening, her visits to many of the therapeutic garden sites she mentions, and her interviews with many people, professionals and patients alike…Full of surprise and wonder.” 

—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review

“Fascinating… Sue Stuart-Smith renders a very special service with this book. Let’s hope it reaches not only the converted but those who need it most.”

—The Observer (UK)

“This is a life-affirming study of the special pleasures of tending your garden and growing things…[Stuart-Smith’s] heartfelt arguments for the benefits of nature and gardening for our mental health are informed by research in neuroscience and the evidence of patients who have improved through therapeutic gardening.”

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The Guardian (UK)

“Wise, insightful, and eloquent, Stuart-Smith’s soulful and sensitive treatise on horticulture’s healing properties is a well-positioned book for the current age of anxiety, offering a personally relevant perspective on how to cope in troubled times.”

—Booklist

“A fascinating overlap between the still stumbling science of psychiatry and the ancient art of gardening.”

—Financial Times

“[Stuart-Smith] offers science-backed insight into the healing effects of nature…a joyful, peace-giving read.”

—Woman’s World magazine

“This is a book so wise and comfortable that it merits a place alongside Christopher Lloyd’s
The Well-Tempered Garden by the side of every bed…[Stuart-Smith’s] deep understanding of the human psyche make