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Can worried minds comfort the therself by running with plants? A therapist and her husband, a gardener, say yes.
By Rebecca Mead
In mid-March, in the tense week before the UK government announced its coronavirus-induced delayed lockdown, some pieces have become incredibly hard to find. Panicked shoppers left the basics of nutrition and disposal behind: yeast, flour, toilet paper. More surprisingly, the horticultural industry has noticed an increase in demand. In the week before the shutdown began, sales of plants, seeds and bulbs are said to have risen as much as 35% from 2019. Seed packages, especially for tomatoes and lettuce, were in limited supply. As Britain grappled with the COVID crisis, it was difficult to be calm, and one way to do that was to reliably sprout a jar of watercress on the windowsill or windowsill. a row of chard in a garden
Eight out of ten people in Britain live in a personal turf space; at least one in ten has access to a shared balcony, terrace, patio or lawn. National affection for lawns supports a horticultural industry that is worth around $ 30 billion a year to the British economy. British consumers spend more than $ 3 billion a year on garden centers, many of which are sprawling outdoor outlets offering cafes offering quiches and cream teas, and bored children’s play areas. begonias. The Horticultural Trade Association, founded in 1899, estimates that some of all adults in the UK interact on some type of lawn, and over the more than six months, which included an unusually extended era of hot and dry weather, the British have been able to make more grass than ever. Once the shutdown began, the Royal Horticultural Society, the country’s leading lawns charity, saw a dramatic increase in web searches on how to grow potatoes, and the number of other people asking how to compost or divide the plants. perennials was six times higher than the after-year figure.
I was one of those Londoners who believed that they could simply counteract imaginable disruptions in the food supply chain by developing edible plants. I spent countless hours searching for seeds online, which I figured I could grow in the 3 pots that the former occupant of my space had left on a rooftop terrace; they had been overlooked and destructive since my husband, son, and I moved in last year. Finally, I discovered an online nursery that still had seedlings, and I ordered a dozen lumps of arugula and spinach. They weren’t traveling well: when a packet of trays arrived despite everything, two weeks later, the soil had been shaken up more often with the bubble wrap and the seedlings looked like blades of grass. Despite my efforts to gently bend the roots into the ground and revive the plants with daily watering, they totaled; A few weeks later, I threw the trays in the trash.
I was never a gardener, but my parents energetically cultivated the modest garden of my formative years house in Weymouth, a coastal city 120 miles southwest of London. When I was young, the grass was largely true to the grass so my brother and I could just play too, however my father had a small garden where he grew green beans, tomatoes and squash, and we had a plum tree. and a pear tree. Along the edges of the lawn, my parents planted beds of fragrant roses and giant daisies; hostas flourished in gloomy and gloomy corners. My father died 8 years ago; my mom, who is now eight and nine, still lives in the house. Over the decades, lawns have gotten smaller and beds busier and more abundant, planted with clumps of geraniums and clouds of lavender. Until a few years ago, my mother cut the golden-green griselinia hedges herself; now she’s given the toughest jobs to Shane, a seasoned retired firefighter some twenty years her junior, who mows the lawns and prunes the largest shrubs. Most days when the weather is nice, my mom spends hours on the lawn weeding or transplanting plants, or having a cup of coffee on a bench amid the haven of fragrant honeysuckle. Somewhere between a conifer and an apple tree for cooking, my father’s ashes are scattered. “Shane would possibly be here for the last time,” she wrote to me in March, after the government announced that older people deserve to isolate themselves. “It will be attractive to see the grass turn into a meadow this summer. “
“When we sow a seed, we are planting a narrative of long-term possibilities,” writes British psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith in her new e-book, “The Well-Gardened Mind. ” A wonderful UK bestseller, it launched in America before this summer. In recent years, the intellectual fitness benefits of turf have been widely identified in Britain. Primary care physicians are increasingly giving patients a “ social prescription ” to do anything like volunteering on a local netpaintings lawn, believing such paintings can be as supportive as communicating treatment or antidepressants. findings that patients recovering from catastrophic injuries can heal faster if they have access to outdoor spaces with plants. The Stuart-Smith e-book compares the uses of grass in old and new remedies for intellectual fitness and reports empirical studies on the effects of grass on mood. (Lab rats whose cages involve dirt and logs are more lively and sociable than those whose cages come with a wheel, ladder, and tunnel. ) It is based on thirty years of clinical practice. Formerly a senior physician in psychotherapy in the county of Hertfordshire, she now paints for a branch of the British Medical Association that provides intellectual fitness support to physicians. She also reports through her own closeness to the lawn on an unusually higher level: Her husband of thirty-four years, Tom Stuart-Smith, is one of the best-known lawn designers in the country, with clients ranging from Victoria Beckham to the Queen; In 2002, he created a public lawn at Windsor Castle to commemorate the monarch’s Golden Jubilee.
In “The Well-Gardened Mind,” Sue Stuart-Smith seeks to go beyond the obvious that hitting the grass is right for you. “A lot of the studies that have been done have been done through environmental psychologists, looking at things like attention and cognition,” he told me recently. “All of that is very important. But he was interested in the subconscious facets of the lawn: the symbolism and the point of metaphor. His e-book describes a middle-aged patient, Kay, whom he was treating for depression. As a child, Kay had been the victim of neglect and violence; As an adult, she had conflicts with her two teenage sons, whom she raised alone, in an apartment with a small lawn that the boys had destroyed with their antics. When her children moved in, Kay took over the lawn. One day in therapy, he made a surprising observation: “This is the only time I feel smart. ” Stuart-Smith explains that feeling smart, rather than just feeling smart, is an example of the restorative power of grass. Gardening has provided Kay a safe haven and a commitment to the world beyond herself; She also showed her ability to provide care and tenderness, in a less tense context than that of her circle of family relationships.
To defend the deep, yet sometimes dark, meaning with which we permeate our gardens, Stuart-Smith draws primarily from the paintings of the British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, who died in 1971 at the age of seventy-four. Winnicott defended the fundamental importance of play in developing a child’s sense of self. He was also known for his writings on the basic bond between mothers and their children, and he developed the concept of “grasping” to describe the child’s first delight with his mother, not as a separate individual but as a fused being. that supplies what is required for its continued existence. Winnicott came here with the concept of a “transitional” area, in which the child, feeling secure enough of her mother’s early care, begins to let go of the feeling of being fused with her. In such an area, which can be discovered in a cuckoo game, when a baby revels in the loss and then reconstitution of his mother, a child explores the probabilities of separation through play, experiencing what Winnicott called a paradoxical feeling. . to be “alone, as a baby and as a child, in the presence of the mother.
A garden, Stuart-Smith suggests, can be a Winnicottian “middle ground” area that allows the inner and outer worlds to coexist – “a gathering position for our innermost, dream-infused self and the genuine physical world. ” The meditative and repetitive facets of gardening can serve as a form of play for adults who have given up play in a different way or who, like Stuart-Smith’s patient Kay, have been denied the opportunity to do so. safe in her childhood. Gardening can be especially helpful for other people with P. T. S. D. Stuart-Smith describes studies carried out by two professors at the University of Copenhagen, Dorthe Poulson and Ulrika Stigsdotter, in a Danish arboretum. One war veteran said that only in the group of trees did he feel safe enough to close his eyes. Another related that the trees presented him with mute and total acceptance: “There is a tree and I am sitting here, without expectations, without questions, without anything.
Gardening can also help heal brain damage through the more common grief bureaucracy, such as grief. Contemplating the restorative effect of tillage in his own backyard, Stuart-Smith writes that, “In the corner of the garden, I am the kind of company that allows me to be alone and enter my own world. ” This spring, as I sat with my withered rocket in the courtyard of the area where I was largely confined, I told myself that my impulse to sow seeds was more than just keeping my fridge fully stocked. Gardening was a way of being with my mother, which I cannot visit, because she was alone in the area of my childhood, growing vegetables.
A few weeks after closing, I met with Sue and Tom Stuart-Smith on a Zoom call. They were in the house, on the lawn, and behind them I can see a rippling sea of pink and purple flowers, supported by rounded green benches of hedges and tall trees. Sue was doing her charts remotely, rather than in London. Tom’s many public projects had been put on hold: a lawn he had designed for the Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery in Yorkshire, which was due to be completed this spring, would remain unfinished for now. “But with personal clients, the homeowners are now all at home and really in the know,” Tom said. “Instead of one incoherent email per month saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a lawn of cuttings?’ I get one a day saying ‘What is this plant here?’ “The Stuart-Smiths Were I’m Not surprising that the pandemic has led the British to become even more engrossed in the grass. Sue said:” Whenever there is a crisis, be it a war, after a war or a herb crisis, we see this phenomenon of urgent biophilia. “She pointed out that in World War I, the squads created lawns in their trenches, developing not only vegetables to eat but also flowers. ” We get our livelihood from the regeneration of nature, “he says.
The Stuart-Smiths met in 1978, as undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Sue was reading English and then she would have done a PhD. in romantic poetry, however, when he was entering his senior year, his father died, at the age of forty-seven, of bone marrow failure. The mixture of her pain and her discovery of Freud, in an elegance that covered morals and philosophy, helped her become a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. “I looked for a more direct interaction with the world,” he says. Meanwhile, Tom was reading zoology, but the adolescent fascination with gardening intensified in Cambridge. There he met Geoffrey Jellicoe, one of the most prominent gardeners of the 20th century, whose practice was encouraged through Renaissance architecture and Jungian theory, and Lanning Roper, an ingenious American landscaper known for combining design and exuberance. For the first time, Tom thought of gardening as a career option for him. After graduating he went to Manchester to practice as a landscape architect.
When the Stuart-Smiths married in 1986, Sue had enrolled at University College Hospital in London and Tom had started his career. “I made an underground nuclear bunker for the R. A. F. ,” he told me. “I made a tank in Devon. ” He does not dream of a gardener (he had long thought gardening was outdoor housework), yet he embraced Tom’s interest by accompanying him on his visits to England’s famous gardens: Sissinghurst, in Kent, where Vita Sackville -West and Harold Nicolson amassed one of the country’s gardens. wonderful collections of plants; Knightshayes, Devon, with its statuesque topiary and remarkable vegetable garden. During this time, they read psychoanalytic thinkers, such as Winnicott, whose theories Sue learned to put into practice. “There is a kind of shared territory,” Sue told me.
When they first married, they lived in a space with a small lawn in Queen’s Park, north-west London. In 1987, Tom’s parents presented them with the opportunity to build a space in a dilapidated 17th century barn that they were restoring across from Serge Hill, the property where Tom and his mother grew up in Hertfordshire. Tom’s father, Sir Murray Stuart-Smith, a higher court ruled at the time; his mother, Lady Joan Stuart-Smith, head of the local trial court. “My father had problems with the structure and at that time the Superior Court judges had a 3-month vacation,” Tom said. “For two summers they hired a team of masons, my mother the assignment manager and my father the largest lumber hauler, and they renovated the barn. Sue, heartbroken for her father, eager to put down roots; during the time they moved in, their daughter Rose was born. (Two sons, Ben and Harry, followed). But the task of renovating the barn has its stresses. “My father’s technique is very practical, while my technique is partly practical, but also aesthetic,” Tom recalls. “He’d set up a deck and I’d come in and say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is definitely terrible. ‘ An opportunity for self-reliance presented itself through the lawn, which Tom has to coax to a stony hill that faces north.
The Barn Garden, as the five-acre site is now known, serves not only as a family circle, but also as a laboratory for Tom’s practice. It is noted for its sensual and cerebral creations, combining synthetic shapes and structures (a trimmed hedge, a grid of paths) with patterns created through the wild. In a personal area on the Norfolk coast, an orchard-like area surrounded by tall hedges and wooden fences features fringed staghorn sumac trees, which are planted with boxwood arranged to recapitulate the garbage bureaucracy that is forming. on a nearby beach. Working with a North London couple who had a young son, Stuart-Smith remodeled a 2,000-square-foot backyard into a fantastic, stylized woodland that looks like anything from Maurice Sfinishak, with part of a dozen giant ferns. bulging mounds of boxwood. At the end of the garden is a litter box and a secret lawn for the little ones: “a hiding position”, as Tom says.
A client’s search for the best circular grass year-round could possibly collide with the mental rewards that Tom and Sue can foster. “A lawn is essentially a procedure: there are changes, and it rarely dies and rarely hibernates,” said Tom. One of Winnicott’s major vital contributions to child psychology was outlining the perception of a “smart enough” mother who, by being less than the best and infrequently frustrating the demands of her bathroom, is helping her. to be informed of where it ends and where it begins. Tom urges his clients to view the lawn from what we might call a more Winnipegger perspective: “It’s like the smart enough parent: it has a lot more to do with what you think of your lawn than what it is. appearance. Your lawn can be the ultimate fantastic mess, but if you like it, because there’s a fox living in a corner and a lot of snails that you know personally by name, and you still have a deep relationship with that, so it’s a pretty fancy lawn.
The barn lawn is a fairly elegant lawn and a normal lawn. In a landscape passed down through his parents, Tom has created a very unique place. The lawn also expresses the reciprocity of a long marriage in which enthusiasms were exchanged. “The Well-Gardened Mind” is an exploration of concepts that Sue was driven, in large part, through the pleasure of living with Tom; the barn lawn shapes the concepts Tom has developed over decades of verbal exchange with Sue. Over the years, Tom explained to me, his landscape designs increasingly reflect concepts of attachment and separation; safe enclosures close to space are gradually opening up to wilder spaces beyond. At the Norfolk property, the manicured lawn with sumac trees leads to a much wilder lawn that leads to the North Sea.
On a beautiful sunny day in June, my husband and I made a layover at Stuart-Smiths in Barn Garden, where they had spent most of their time since the closing began. For twelve weeks we had not been more away from home than we could simply pedal our bikes; With public shipping out of reach for everyone, unless they are essential workers, we walked for up to an hour to the nearest open car rental workplace and then drove to North West London on the M1 motorway, which it had incessant traffic, even when it was closed. Serge Hill is less than a mile from the intersection of the M1 with the M25, the motorway that surrounds London. The assets are on a narrow road that would have accommodated a bit of a hay cart when the surrounding domain was all farmland; In a 2011 photobook titled “The Barn Garden,” Tom writes about how lighting fixtures on the roads at night “surround us like a luminous necklace of sodium. ” We were the first stopovers the Stuart-Smiths had won in many weeks, and they waved at us from the prescribed awkward distance as their burrowing Rabbit hot on our heels. Sitting on the deck, we looked out over what was once a corral and is now a grassy courtyard, with brick walkways between beds dancing with purple allium pompoms. There were other purples in abundance, a fresh complement to the dominant green. The view was beautiful, but the roar of traffic was intimidating. “In the morning you can tell which way the wind is blowing without opening the windows,” Tom said sadly. Still, the road served as a useful reminder from the global outside: it made total retreat to the personal world of a lawn impossible.
The barn lawn grew slowly as the Stuart-Smiths acquired more land, mostly from Tom’s older brother. (His father is still alive, at the age of ninety-two; his mother died in 2015). In addition to the more enclosed spaces near the house, there is a domain called Prairie, which was started by Stuart-Smith. to be planted ten years ago with flowers that bloom from last summer to early fall: red-hot pinpricks, asters and echinacea. He also added an extension of meadow, where he planted many trees, from oaks to chestnut and zelkova. This year, the Stuart-Smiths are transforming the property’s former orchard into a net lawn and providing subdivisions to close off residents. It will also be the setting for a curative gardening program, similar to those described in “The Well-Kept Mind”; It will be jointly overseen through the Sunnyside Rural Trust, a charity that serves other people with learning disabilities.
As we appeared through the gardens, Tom and Sue first led us through the barn. Warm-colored kilims hung from antique beams above a seating area furnished with upholstered sofas, sculptures perched on tables, and giant bookcases. The domain had the setting of Freud’s outstanding analytical study, but on a gigantic scale. A huge window framed the field beyond. A huge honeysuckle, which seemed to have thrived since Stuart-Smith’s wedding, scaled a dark tile wall and crawled to the ceiling. A narrow strip of grass stretched from the house, drawing the gaze up a slight rise toward sculptural mounds of boxwood and flat-topped hedges; the grassy path was like a serene green river that flowed uphill instead of downhill. On the sides were accents of willow, small purple flowers with long leaves. The plant grows wild on the edges of roads and the banks of English railways. Tom said: “My plantations are surely full of things that should not be used in people’s gardens because they are so rebellious. “
We entered a domain where trees planted thirty years ago had created a shady canopy. In the dense bed of plants in front of us, thin stems topped with fragments of delicate pastel flowers — orange, pink, yellow — had grown twice the height of their neighbors, looking like thin sticks of licorice dipped in straw. “They are foxtail lilies,” Tom explained. “They are from Kazakhstan. Is not it wonderful? “
As Tom led us across the lawn, he explained that there was no prescribed route. “Of course, as a designed thing, a lawn has to be educational to some degree,” he said. “But it will also be a land of discovery and self-expression. ” We entered a small circular hornbeam hedge, and I found myself imagining a game of hide and seek in which this would be an ideal hideout. Tom then led us through what looked like a front door, into a giant domain surrounded by mesh hedges. It was the lawn equivalent to an empty room: a flat lawn dotted with buttercups and surrounded by green walls, the blue sky fringed by cool hedges. After the exhilarating variety of plantations that had preceded me – and with my mind’s eye that had returned, spontaneously, in formative years – walking in the green rectangle gave the impression of entering the office of a psychoanalyst, with its calm invitation to reflect on his non-public history. All that was missing was a sofa.
In “The Well-Gardened Mind”, Sue Stuart-Smith describes the lawns in the area in North London where Freud spent the last year of his life. In the summer of 1938, he fled Vienna with his wife, forced to leave behind 4 sisters, who later died in concentration camps. In September, he moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, most recently the Freud Museum. Having lived for decades in an apartment building in Vienna, Freud now had his first personal lawn. Stuart-Smith recounts how Freud was eager to see him replace throughout the seasons. His son Ernst, an architect, installed patio doors at his father’s workplace to allow simple access to the outside, and at the back of the area he placed a light loggia – an indoor-outdoor area where one can be suspended between worlds.
Freud had spent years battling oral cancer and in the following months his condition worsened. In the early summer of 1939, he slept most of the time outside on a swing in a sheltered corner. Freud’s study, which contained his table and analytical couch, was transformed into a sick room with a bed, from which he can gaze out over the greenery of the courtyard. He died on September 23, 1939, a year after moving. Stuart-Smith writes: “When life excludes us, the lack of sense of the long term is the hardest thing to deal with. Many people, faced with their own mortality or that of their loved ones, become more in tune with the world of herbs. This is evidence not only of a garden’s power to entertain and inspire, but also to its comforting power through its cyclical replenishment.
The spring and summer of 2020 have been darkened by death, not only from the loss of thousands of people to COVID-19, but also from the loss of our ordinary way of life. Gardening has been a convenience to many other people, Sue Stuart-Smith advised me, because it evokes the prospect of some kind of long term, as dubious and unpredictable as it could be. “When the long term seems too bleak, or when other people are too depressed to believe it, the lawn gives you long-term control,” she says. It can also help us accept the inevitability of our demise. On the barn lawn, Tom Stuart-Smith told me that each and every spring, when tawny lily bulbs and summer snowflakes are in bloom and the meadow is full of daffodils, he walks across the lawn with a notebook, to make plans to upload things. in the fall. “I think a lot about next year, but surely I also think about what it will be like when I’m dead,” he said. The long term promised through a lawn may not be ours, but there will be a long term, with or without us.
In mid-May, garden centers reopened in England, they were the first non-essential shops allowed for the industry, and a few weeks later my husband and I walked into our local establishment. After waiting in a marked line along the sidewalk, we loaded a car. The following Sunday I spent hours on our little brick-walled back lawn, pruning bushes the previous owner had planted and pulling weeds. At first I was hesitant, I called the Royal Horticultural Society’s online page on my phone, but my confidence grew. I planted terracotta pots full of herbs: sage, marjoram, basil, thyme. They would accentuate dishes made from store-bought products that, despite my early fears, weren’t hard to find.
As I progressed, I took photos for my mom, who emailed me a recommendation on how to prune a climbing rose and what to do with a giant patch of woody lavender. Pick up the lavender, he said, his time had come. In the current circumstances, I am not convinced that my mother will return to London and see my garden. “Do you have room for a honeysuckle?” She wrote to me. I planted one in a sunny spot behind the wall, hoping the nearly invisible trellis of wires I nailed into the brick would help it get up, as if it were doing it alone. ♦
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Yves Deshommes’ pro-life, as a doorman, art broker, and violinist, has been in the service of improving the lives of his fellow Haitians in their home country.
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