The RHS Feel Good Garden: making mental health a talking-point of Chelsea
Wending their way through the soft curves of the RHS Feel Good Garden, visitors will quietly take in the aromatic smells and be tempted to run their hands through the silky grasses.
That their mind drifts and becomes absorbed in the garden is exactly what designer Matt Keightley hopes will happen. The result of a collaboration between the RHS and the NHS as it celebrates its 70th anniversary, it’s aim is to promote gardening, gardens and green spaces as good for health, happiness and wellbeing.
Launching the RHS Feel Good Garden, rapper Professor Green said: “I know only too well how hard and hopeless it can feel when you suffer from anxiety and depression. I love my own garden and the more time people spend close to nature, away from phones and general pressure of life the better we’ll all feel.”
Feel Good Garden is a sure sign that the benefit of green spaces for our health is once again being recognised
Professor Green, real name Stephen Paul Manderson, has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of his adult life. He isn’t the first well-known figure to extol the mental health virtues of connecting to nature.
Writer, broadcaster, gardener and farmer, Monty Don has spoken in the past about the comforting effects of gardens and gardening, saying: “When you are humiliated or defeated a garden consoles. When you are consumed by anxiety it will soothe you and when the world is a dark and bleak place it shines a light to guide you on.”
It’s hoped that the soothing mixture of vibrant perennials, evergreen mounds and elegant canopy of honey locust, designed by Keightley, twice-winner of the RHS/BBC People’s Choice Award, will provide a contemporary and therapeutic space for visitors to Chelsea to pause for reflection. But it will also focus the public’s attention on the positive impact that gardens and gardening can have on our health.
A Kings Fund report in 2016 on gardens and health, funded by the National Garden Scheme, found that the mental health benefits of gardening were broad and diverse, with reductions in depression and anxiety and improved social functioning, emotional wellbeing and physical health.
Meanwhile, a 2017 report valued London’s network of public parks and green spaces at £91 billion in terms of social benefits boosting the, health, resilience and economy of the capital.
Chelsea gardens are often so polished, but you can create something lovely with modest resources
As places where people can exercise, socialise and relax, and in doing so improve their physical and mental health, Londoners avoid £950m a year in NHS health costs.
For Dr William Bird MBE, a GP and creator of Green Gyms, it’s a welcome revitalisation of the ancient concept of healing gardens. While the last 100 years have focused on drug cures at the expense of connecting to nature, the Feel Good Garden is a sure sign that the benefit of green spaces for our health is once again being recognised.
Dr Bird, who published The Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health, in January, with contributions from 95 top experts around the world, says the evidence that gardens can heal is overwhelming.
“We know that when people move into nature, chronic inflammation goes down. Serious diseases such as heart disease, dementia, diabetes and depression are all caused by chronic inflammation,” he says.
Simply being out in a garden helps, but doing the gardening yourself is yet another level of benefit.
“There’s a huge benefit to getting outside and smelling, hearing and feeling. To actual garden though and touch the soil and feel you're creating takes the benefits to another level. And then doing that with other people is yet another bonus.”
After the show The Feel Good Garden will live on at Camden and Islington (C&I) NHS Foundation Trust, which provides care and treatment to vulnerable adults in a built-up part of London where green space is limited.
Dr Bird is excited that the NHS is pushing social prescribing, although he concedes it’s a journey that will take some time for everyone to get on board.
But already inroads are being made. Former pop star turned landscape gardener, Kim Wilde has spoken about how horticulture ‘gave me back my life’. She is a supporter of Thrive, which helps people with physical disabilities and mental health issues through gardening therapy. Similar schemes such as Roots and Shoots, set up in 1982 to provides vocational training in horticulture for young people from inner city London, and the recently launched Green Health Awards which encouraging churches to use their green spaces to help communities are all vital initiatives.
“We need to make making green gyms and get people outdoors who don't have gardens,” says Dr Bird.
In particular, he is concerned about the ensuring a healthy connection to nature for younger generations. “We now know from the evidence that you can start to measure the level of inflammation from the age of 6. By that age you’re already on the path to diabetes and heart disease,” he says.
“So taking children out out and connecting them to nature, isn’t prevention, it’s treatment.”
