To me gardening is a therapy and an obsession a joy and a torment!
I’ve a sad story to tell: in my early twenties I suffered from ulcerative colitis (bowel disease), depression, anxiety attacks and agoraphbia. This led to my pretty much wasting my university degree -I couldn’t go to most of my final exams- and also totally wasting about two years of my life in a depressive torpor.
Two things brought me back from the brink and into the land of the living – gardening and a sympathetic doctor at the glasgow hoeopathic hospital who put me on a wheat-free diet.
The dietary changes made me physically and mentally recover in just a few weeks and in an oblique way made me totally question my previously held religious beliefs. To put it very simplistically if simple chemical changes can make me – who I am – different person then what is the personality and what is the soul and is there a creator if were are just random interactions of chemicals.
The gardening made my mental state recover more gradually, the healing power of growing plants and being in contact with the soil and nature are well documented by more eloquent writers than me but I can attest to their power. I’m now a wife and mother and hold down a job, things which I could never have envisaged at my lowest point.
tbc
