My garden sanctuary

"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow." - Audrey Hepburn

Summer has well and truly arrived in England this week. With the early morning light and the warm, hazy breeze I have returned to my favourite morning habit of wandering around my little city garden with my morning coffee.

Gardening was one of the earliest slow living hobbies I started to explore as I started to recover from years of fertility treatments. There is something so relaxing and pleasingly distracting about gardening. Studying your plants for signs of growth, watering at the right intervals, watching your seedlings slowly unveil themselves to you. It is well documented that getting your hands in soil is beneficial for both your physical and mental health, and has the added benefit of reducing anxiety.

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My dreams of an elaborate vegetable garden began the first time I saw the film “Its Complicated”. I’ve always loved the Nancy Meyers lifestyle and beautiful homes, but that house and garden lived in by Meryl Streep’s character, Jane is the house of my dreams.

Unfortunately I live a long way from the California coast and I can only hope that my life is in a similar place 10 years after my divorce. But I can choose to take inspiration from art and build a similar lifestyle for myself, even in my little garden in London.

Fortunately for me, my Dad is excellent at DIY and shortly after my marriage ended he built me some beautiful vegetable beds to start my mini vegetable garden plans. It’s not quite a sprawling, “It’s Complicated” vegetable plot but it is perfect for the new single version of me and is a perfectly manageable size.

My dream is to have a garden filled with beautiful trees and flowers to look over while I have my morning coffee, before harvesting some fresh fruit and vegetables to make healthy food in my kitchen. It is of course a very idyllic dream but over the last year my garden has really become my happy place.

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The more difficult moments of the last year have led me to find solace in the simple, quiet nature of gardening. After some of the more stressful moments I have found myself heading straight to my garden. Grounding barefoot on the grass, planting seedlings into crumbly soil, studying the leaves of my tomato plants willing them to flower as soon as possible.

It of course, serves as a distraction but I think more importantly it serves as a reminder to slow down, breathe, focus on something simple and process in your own time. With each moment I have made a tiny bit of progress on my garden, whether that be a new plant or watering existing ones, and in time that has all come together to create a beautiful space.

So when my therapist says my garden is symbolic of my healing, I honestly do have to agree.

Samantha x

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