I am writing this after one of those
vanishingly rare Sundays when having enough time to spare to spend
the best part of the day in the garden has coincided with the most
glorious warm spring sunshine and it has been blissful.
It strikes me that if we all spent more
time out in our gardens immersed in the rhythms of the seasons and
the way that nature responds to it, watching and enjoying the plant
and animal life that shares our gardens with us, then the world would
be a much happier place. I've always thought that being close to
nature is great therapy, good for body and soul and whatever ails
them and it turns out that much research has been done on the subject
and guess what, I was right all along and there are now specialist
organisations set up to help us in our search for wellness.
Ecotherapy focusses on our connection
with the natural environment and how through learning to care for it
we can in turn learn to care for and nurture ourselves.
Thrive is a charity which helps people
with physical disability or mental ill health through horticulture
and gardening and Project Wild Thing aims to educate adults about the
essential developmental needs of children though their relationship
with nature.
These are just a few of the groups
working to get us outside and back where we belong doing wonderful
worthwhile work but how sad that there is a need for them when just
outside our own back door there it is, the natural world which many
of us have forgotten, or never learned, that we need to belong to.
Now in mid spring is the very best time
to appreciate it, every day sees changes, plants are growing almost
as we watch, new unfurling leaves are fresh and vivid green, the
spring flowers are bursting open and all the animal life that depends
on them is busy making the most of the increased light and warming
temperature to feed up, find a mate and rear their young.
Now in the garden is the most positive
and life affirming place we can possibly be. Why would anybody want
to be anywhere else?
