There are two things I am very passionate about in life and that is Gardening and spreading awareness of Mental health and wellbeing. The therapeutic benefits of gardening are amazing not to mention the physical benefits.
Firstly I am going talk to you about me and my husband, our story and why we both got into gardening. Then I will be talking about to be a bit scientific and give you the facts of how gardening can benefit you. I will talk to you about why I started gardening and how it has benefited my life and speak to you about my husband & how gardening helps him. I have a few testimonies from some of my gardener friends, I have met online through the power of social media , who are going to share with you why the started gardening.
First things first if you are new to my blog , let me introduce myself!
Hi I am Nikki I live in Glasgow in Scotland with my Rabbits Cinnamon & Simba and my husband Neil. We are very lucky to have a large garden which we are remodelling at the moment. I have a small allotment plot 3 metres by 3 and my husband has built me a raised bed area in my garden which is going to be my new Mini Allotment area at home. I have social media pages which you can check out for updates if you want to follow my gardening journey. My twitter is Nikki Gardener , My Facebook is Nikki Gardener and my Instagram is Gardenernikki.
Some photos of me at my allotment and in my Greenhouse.
My husband suffers from severe anxiety and depression and for him gardening has been a savour for him. This is one of the main reason that I got into gardening. My husband has been in the garden with his papa since he was small and has been gardening all his life. But it wasn't until he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety that he begun to realise that the garden helps him and can be a natural form of antidepressants.
I started gardening really as a help for my husband as he was struggling with his joints and struggled to be able to weed the garden so I became the chief weeder. I didn't even realise that this was at first helping me , to get out and clear my mind and really to enable me to help & support my husband with his depression. I began to develop an interested in flowers and helping to pick what we would have in our garden. But it really started to become a hobby & passion over the last five years when I began to want to learn how to grow my own food and teach others how to grow their own food. Now myself and my husband have a hobby and interest we can do together.
Recently there was a study conducted about how microbes in the soil (friendly bacteria) when you work in the mud with your hands in the dirt (without ) gloves that these microbes can activate brain cells to produce the chemical serotonin ,this could be similar to the effect of antidepressants but a natural form of antidepressants. This study was conducted by Bristol university and university college London. I think this is amazing as I have always felt that the garden has been a god send for my husband and has helped him to improve his mental health and wellbeing. It for me also show the power of nature to heal you and help you, also as someone who always has liked to have her hands in the dirt , it explains why I love to have my hands in the dirt!
My hands are always covered in mud when i am in the garden , I wouldn't have it any other way!
I just wanted to touch on mental health as part of my blog post and talk about how important it is to create good bonds and build up trust with your loved ones or friends. For me I had never known someone with depression or anxiety before I met my husband. But maybe the problem is that no one was speaking or highlighting the importance of looking after your mental health. I began to notice signs with my husband when we first moved in together and i will be honestly i did not have clue what was wrong at first, but as i began to notice and research i began to see that my husband was in fact suffering from depression & anxiety.
For me the main thing was i wanted to help him and support him. My husband found to very very hard at first to open up to me and talk about what he was feeling. I struggled to get my husband to go to the doctors for help or go on medication to help him manage his depression & anxiety. But having said that when I did get him to the doctor until recently he found he was just being told his problems were not depression or he was just given tablets and told to just take them.
Until August 2020 when I called the doctors for my husband to be able to get support as his depression or the dark cloud has crept in (my husbands words) he was at the time having suicidal thoughts and knew he needed to reach out and get help. He spoke to a doctor on the phone due to covid restrictions. the doctor treated him like a friend, my husband struggles to be able to express himself and often I will have to tell the doctor how he feels as he psychically cant get the words out. He said to me he felt at ease and he felt like the doctor cared and related to him.
It has taken me almost 12 years to get my husband to the point where he will talk about his mental health issues for him, he feels due to the stigma that it is an embarrassment or weakness to have depression. Which sadly I think is what a lot of people still feel , I think we need to as a nation start to educate our children & families that it is ok not to be ok. We need to teach children , what they are feeling and how to cope with our feelings and ask for help . My husband is getting better at opening up and will talk about to me about how he feels even the dark thoughts about feeling suicidal, he will always share it with me . Which at first , I found very hard as his girlfriend at the time for him to share this with me but I always say to Neil : Please tell me how you feel as bad as it may be please tell me because then I can help you or get you support but if you don't tell me I cant help. This is the rule we live by in our house , is we share how we are feeling and what we are struggling with , we know each other very well and I feel like there is nothing I couldn't tell my husband which is a great bond to have with your loved one. We support each other and we are always there for each other.
As a couple we found that the garden and being out in the garden helped to lift Neil's mood. This is something we try to do as much as possible is to get out in the garden and be in the garden whether it be pottering about, tidying the greenhouse or even this year remodelling the garden. He does sometimes come to the allotment plot with me and helps me to do the nursery plot or my plot or if I need something built. It gives him purpose, it gives him something to keep his mind busy and also a sense of achievement that he as designed it in his head and made it come to life. This is one of the hobbies that Neil has that helps him with is depression and his arthritis.
Lastly I would like to add that if you are a loved one of someone who has depression , you must make sure that you ,yourself have an outlet and a support bank you can reach out to. You can’t look after and support someone, if you yourself are not looking after yourself , as they say a problem shared is a problem halved. I have developed over the years a great group of friends who are people i can go to and say when i am struggling or tell them about anything and i am very lucky to have had them in my life. My mum and dad are very supportive for myself and Neil.
Neil's mum, dad and uncle have also been a massive support link for me to help support him. But I also think you have to have something a hobby or club or for me the allotment as somewhere where you go and you rest, get away from everything and recharge your own batteries. Gardening for me has definitely changed my life and my husbands life.
I want to share with you something that my husband showed me and told me about and he said to me this is how he feels and it can give you an insight into what it is like living with depression & anxiety. I will admit its a hard hitting video that for me was quite emotional watching as when you see the video , you yourself will see just how hard it is to even do the little things in life while having depression:
https://youtu.be/XiCrniLQGYc if you click on or copy and highlight this link it will take you to the YouTube video made my the world health organisation. ( I had a black dog its name is depression)
I just want to share with you some links that you can look at if you or a loved one are struggling with your mental health:
https://www.supportinmindscotland.org.uk
www.sane.org.uk
https://mentalhealth-uk.org
I am now going to show you some of the benefits of gardening and how it can benefit you mentally and physically when you start to do the garden.
These are just some of the amazing benefits that gardening can have on your mental health and wellbeing. I found that gardening not only helped me to be able to cope with supporting my husband with his depression and his prostatic arthritis but it gave me a place to go and clear my mind. It has given me self-confidence and it has given me a chance to be able to meet a group of people at the allotment of all ages who I have become good friends with and it feels like a second home at the allotment. It has given me even stronger love of nature and growing my own flowers and food. It has ignited a passion for gardening in me and I love nothing more than pottering even in my own greenhouse. It has been said that you think you are nurturing the garden but really what we don't realise is the garden is in fact nurturing us, our body and soul.
This is just a small snippet of the benefits of gardening but this will be the first of many blogs about mental health and gardening. I will continue to write and share awareness' of mental health and wellbeing. I hope one day the stigma of mental health will no longer exists and we can all talk openly about our mental health. Until then I will keep talking about mental health and keep sharing my story in hope that one day this will be a reality.
Now I am going to share with you the stories of my gardening friends on Instagram or Twitter I would like to thank each and every one of them for coming forward and telling their story of why they garden and what the garden does to help them. You guys rock!
Michelle from @so_i_started_a_garden (Instagram)
As a child, I often helped my grandfather in his garden. As I grew up, I helped my mom with her flower beds. Gardening has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Now that I have my own house with a yard, I have enjoyed filling it with flowers.
But it’s more than being “just about the flowers.” Gardening has been my refuge, especially during this time. It is the place where I go to sit and think or even unwind. I have never once left my garden stressed. Looking at all the hard work serves as a source of pride and joy, as well. Working in the garden has a way of calming me and renewing my spirit. I started an Instagram account to share my garden joy with others, but what I found was an incredibly supportive gardening community.
Armadillo Blue from Twitter
I think that everyone can agree that the last 12 months have been hard and tough on mental health.
For most of lockdown I was also in an extremely stressful job, so I needed a release and for me I found this on my allotment, from clearing it and turning it into a blank canvas ready for the up coming season, to the harvesting of the crops that gave me great pride and a sense of achievement, like life not everything went to plan ( dam those pesky swedes) but most did as I tried to keep it simple.
Simple tasks such as watering after work (sometimes before ) would clear my mind of the stress and the worries of everyday life, I lose myself for hours on end and with a bench I can relax and breathe in the fresh air ( while I watch the chickens peck and scratch) as the world slowly comes back to normal I have developed new habits that involve the out doors and my allotment, so when I feel that life is getting to much pottering is the order of the day.
When i first got my Allotment plot:
My Allotment plot now :
The Nottinghamshire Gardener (Instagram)
For 15 years I've suffered from anxiety. It has stopped me from feeling able to attend events, driving my car and seeing those I love the most. Fundamentally it can control my life, I hate it. It has at times made me feel like a failure and like I don't deserve to be here. My body sometimes reacts physically to situations that make me feel anxious. I feel like I can't breathe, my heart is racing and my eyesight goes blurry.
After numerous attempts at different medication, counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy. It was a conversation with my GP about gardening that changed my life forever. My GP advised that with gardening people often find a level of escapism that helps them switch off from the world around them. She was right and I will be forever in her debt.
All of my mums side of the family are immensely talented gardeners and I never felt I could do it. I'd dabbled with the odd tomato plant, a few tulip bulbs but nothing more. My father in law kindly built me some raised beds from pallet wood and I was hooked. Everyday, I had something to focus on, something that allowed me to shut away what was bothering me. I got such enjoyment from growing plants from seed and watching them grow. I sowed a pumpkin seed in 2019 and it grew into a monstrous 9ft plant that provided me with a 15kg pumpkin. I was so proud.
Gardening brings me level of joy and inner peace that I have never experienced before. I don't feel judged, when I immerse my hands in soil, I feel like the possibilities are endless and that I'm in control.
Before gardening, I struggled with managing stress, since I've taken it up I've not taken day of sick due to it in 5 years. I'm not going to preach that it's a cure but it really has changed my life. I still have bad days but I have far more good days than ever before and my confidence has grown immensely. I've met an amazing group of people on the Instagram gardening community. People that understand, that don't judge and make me feel like it's okay to just be me. It's been wonderful.I've realised that whatever happens in my life that as along as I have a few seeds, a couple of pots and a bag of compost. I'll be just fine. I've found something that helps me manage my mental health and for that I am eternally grateful.
Kelly from Instagram (- kelz_veggies_plot9)
For many years I have suffered with bouts of mild depression and anxiety. I have tried many things to alleviate these feelings/symptoms but nothing quite worked and I was finding it difficult.
With the recent pandemic, working from home and being a single mum to two I was feeling completely overwhelmed and could feel myself suffocating. I remember coming across a newspaper article about an elderly man who had turned his garden into an oasis of flowers and I thought 'ohh that looks fun!' and this is where it began!
I turned my attention to the garden and decided to create a border and abought some flowers to plant. Then some seeds to sow. Everything started to grow and the sense of joy I got helped me to feel calmer. I then decided to make a veggie bed. Well, when I started with the veg seeds I was hooked! The sense of achievement and satisfaction I got from watching those seeds grow made me feel less worried and anxious and above all else - happy!
I tell everyone I can about how gardening has had a positive effect on my mental health and well-being. I now even have my own allotment and just lose myself in making it a place where I can lose myself, thoughts and worries.
I can honestly tell you now, gardening has helped me so much.
Thank you once again to everyone for sharing your stories! I am honestly blown away by the response and just so grateful that you all reached out to be part of my blog.
Lastly I want to share with you two quotes from two of my favourite Gardeners :
Monty Don and Mark lane talking about gardening & how it has helped them.
Monty Don :
“I have for many years, suffered from depression, which comes and goes but tends to be something that is worse in winter,” he explained.
“And, touch wood, it's been much better for the last few years.
“But for me, the benefits of nature are all about the physical connection with the rhythm of the natural world.
“Some of that rhythm is bleak - winter is cold.
“And yet even if inside you are bleak and grey and cold, if you believe that spring will blossom inside you, as well as outside in the garden, that's powerful,” Monty explained.
“So that's how it works for me.”
Mark Lane :
“I had a period where I was unable to get out of bed, unable to do anything,” explains Mark. “I knew using a wheelchair was just around the corner. The dark spectre of depression sat on my shoulder 24/7. There were days when I was really down and I would go to a very dark place.”
Mark, who was being treated for depression and by then using a wheelchair, found he was happiest when he was outside in the garden.
“Jasen pointed out that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants and he suggested I did something with it,” says Mark. “It was true. I’ve always loved plants.”
He was accepted onto an online diploma course in horticulture which he passed with flying colours in three months.
“I loved every element of it,” he laughs. “Having a purpose lifted my spirits. It was as if a little match inside me had finally been ignited.
“I felt so happy with my hands in soil, so once I qualified I started doing my friends’ gardens. Soon the jobs came in and when gardens were too big for me to get around I appointed a surveyor.” “I love every minute of my work. My depression is under control, my energy levels have increased, strong painkillers control my pain and I feel as if my brain neurons are sparking again. I’m a completely different person.”
Both quotes where taken from articles by The Express which you can click on these links to read further:
1.
To finish off and end my blog this week I wanted to share some of my favourite quotes about gardening! Thank you for reading my blog and I hope that you will come back for my upcoming blogs next week on the 3rd and 6th of May. Until then you will find me in the Garden!
My Favourite gardening Quotes:
This first quote for me personally is something I really relate to as weeding is the reason I began to do the garden. It was then I started to realise the power a garden has to help you and how it can heal you.
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