Another Life: I am living proof of the value of horticultural therapy

There they are again, pushing up a whole inch – centimetres aren’t strong enough – from the margarine tub on my workroom window sill: the first tomato seedlings of my gardening year. This time they’re growing from seeds I saved myself, from one fat and ripe fruit in last year’s tunnel crop, a tomato cut and squished and left to ferment until I could sieve out the seeds to dry them – such tiny, flimsy, papery things in the end. Not, of course, from an F1 hybrid that won’t safely reproduce, but from a “heritage” beefsteak, ‘Pantano Romanesco’, huge and bulgy and pollinated by bumblebees for who knows how many generations. And they all came up – every one.

I may have kicked off a column a bit like this before. It’s the excitement when things start growing again, around about my birthday: it carries me on.

I’ve rushed the spring a bit, of course, with seeds sown on window sills and in the polytunnel. Before the winds went polar again I was in there with the seed box and bag of compost, sowing lettuce, calabrese, ‘Hispi’ cabbage, early carrots, marigolds to bring in the bees and hoverflies. I sowed a ridge of early potatoes, with the kneeling yoke that helps me get up again. And I remembered to perch the box of mangetout peas, two to each yogurt pot, on a tall and slippery-sided bucket that wood mice, notable thieves, cannot climb.

How good it felt to be working there, surrounded by green, overwintering food, with ravens clearing their throats overhead and the robin come in to look. Am I my father all over again, sifting seeds between finger and thumb? Or is my rejuvenated mood just another bit of evidence for horticultural therapy?

"Biophilia" was coined by Edward O Wilson, the great American biologist, for the inherent affinity that human beings have for the rest of nature, our active need for surroundings with flowers and trees. I discussed it here once when flowers were withdrawn from Ireland's hospital wards, because of fears of breeding noxious bacteria in the vases. I hoped the new children's hospital would have all the planted terraces in the first architect's drawings. The new one has outdoor gardens, not at all the same as the flutter of green leaves outside the window.

Biophilia, meanwhile, has given research a new theme. As ageing populations begin to overwhelm developed societies with the cost of prolonging human lives, the role of gardens (and, I might add, polytunnels) in keeping the elderly healthy and happy is standing up to scientific analysis. Quite apart from the casual evidence of elderly and cheerful “focus groups” mustered specially to say what everybody knows, feeling good about gardening is borne out clinically, by psychiatry – even biochemistry.

There's a paper called What Is the Evidence to Support the Use of Therapeutic Gardens for the Elderly?, published in the journal Psychiatry Investigation in 2012 (online at iti.ms/1x76aeU) and written by a nine-strong team of researchers drawn from the US and South Korea (where, says the UN, one in five people will be over 80 in 20 years' time). It lists about 100 studies relevant to the benefits of horticultural therapy and garden settings "in reduction of pain, improvement in attention, lessening of stress, modulation of agitation, lowering of as-needed medications, anti-psychotics and reduction of falls."

We may not all be patients with Alzheimer’s, or exiled to nursing homes, needing safe gardens to wander and potter in. Just having contact with nature is key to feeling better. One structured study found that having plants in the hospital room following surgery “shortened patients’ post-operative hospitalisation, reduced analgesic use, and reduced pain, anxiety and fatigue when compared to the control group that had no plants in their rooms.”

I remember, recovering from surgery in the days before such worries, the uplifting breath of spring that came with a pot of blooming primroses and violets that stayed on my bed tray.

There are studies of what happens to blood pressure, pulse rate, salivary cortisol levels – all signals involved in stress – when groups of patients walk in urban as compared with rural settings (guess which scores better), and the beneficial impact of half an hour’s light gardening, “an involved and goal-directed way of interacting with nature”, and so on.

In Ireland, horticultural therapy is on its way to being a new profession. Bord Bia’s website hosts a short essay on the subject by one Fiann Ó Nualláin, who is persuasive about its scope, skills and benefits. I like his claim that “gardening makes one philosophical in outlook”, accepting and undaunted by circumstances beyond one’s control. So some seeds didn’t come up – “a lot of things in life are not viable, but wow, look at how tall the ones that did germinate are now.”

The wow factor, indeed. Start sowing something now.