Sue Stuart-Smith on Nature, Childhood & The Garden as Medicine

0:02Sue Stuart-Smith:I realized that when I was in the garden I had that same feeling like I had as a child, being lost in play. You know, when you feel you're in your own world, you feel safe and you've got a sense of freedom somehow, inner freedom, and your mind can just sort of wander as well. I think that's a lot of what gardening does for people. On a cardiovascular level, we know being out in nature, within minutes your blood pressure drops a bit, your heart rate settles down, your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels drop within about 30 minutes. I think it's absolutely the centre of my life. It's kind of like a place I always want to come back to and I don't want to leave.

0:52Hello and welcome to the Homing Podcast. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest is Sue Stuart-Smith, psychiatrist and author of the best-selling book The Well-Gardened Mind. Her husband Tom was a guest on the podcast a couple of months ago and today I'm chatting to Sue in their beautiful greenhouse surrounded by plants with tendrils dangling around our ears. Sue's work of course explores the power of nature to make us feel better. She runs the Surge Hill Project, a garden and event space where local children and disadvantaged groups come to learn about the link between gardening and well-being. Sue says that getting your hands in the soil helps you metabolize your thoughts and gets you looking forward rather than dwelling on the past.

1:40She talks me through the positive hormonal effects of gardening on the body and about the beneficial bacteria in the soil. This conversation took place in the autumn, just as their garden was about to tip over. She gave me a tour of her beautiful private gardens, including the veg garden and swimming pond, and we'll make that available to our members on Patreon as always. Because we recorded it in the greenhouse, you can hear the occasional light aircraft buzzing around and maybe a barking terrier in the background. But in a way that feels quite fitting, I think, because this is a conversation about stepping outside, tuning into the natural world and maybe finding a gentler rhythm.

2:23I really hope you enjoy listening. Hi Sue. Hi Matt. So just, would you just describe what you do for us? Because obviously a lot of people will be very familiar with your amazing book, The Well-Guarded Mind. But beyond the book, what else is it that you do professionally?

2:41Sue Stuart-Smith:I still do some psychotherapy practice, which is for a not-for-profit called DocHealth. It looks after doctors suffering from stress and burnout and depression and so on. And then my main role really is running the project, the Surge Hill Project, which is a community interest company that I founded with Tom. We set it up about two years ago now. and we have a whole programme of visiting schools, community groups, we've started a social prescribing initiative for people recovering from cancer treatment. We've got links with two local charities who regularly bring groups, another community group for people suffering from dementia and their carers.

3:32Sue Stuart-Smith:They come on a seasonal basis and do art projects with us. So we've got a whole programme, different kinds of connecting with different groups in the community. And I think we've had, in terms of school visits, we've had about six or 700 kids through the Plant Library and to the Affle House since we opened. It's amazing. It's very generous, I think, to open up your home in that way to the community. Having written my book and having been very inspired by some of the projects I visited, and with Tom moving his studio back here, it kind of, it felt like it made sense. And I don't know about generosity.

4:21Sue Stuart-Smith:I think you could see it like that, but it's not how I would see it. I think because you get back so much too. Yeah. What do you get from that? It's very enriching. Meeting lots of interesting people, seeing kids who arrive down there sort of just open up. You know, it's like they arrive in a sort of, oh, nervous state and you can see they're stressed. We have a couple of pastoral care groups that come. And by the end of the visit, they're just in a very different space. And all one can hope is that, you know, they may take away something from that, something from being in connection with nature, maybe they've been sowing seeds, maybe they've been doing artworks inside.

5:08Sue Stuart-Smith:We often let kids choose their favourite flower from the plant library and then they can go and we have some lovely Victorian inkwell specimen vases so they can sit there with their own chosen flower and draw it or paint it, whatever they feel like doing. So I want to talk to you obviously about the Well Garden Mine, but before we do that, can I just take you back to your own experience of being a child, because you referenced children there. What was your engagement with nature when you were young? Where did you grow up? I grew up, I went to school in Wimbledon, so I spent quite a lot of time in Richmond Park as a child, riding and so on.

5:48Sue Stuart-Smith:Did quite a lot of sailing. My father was a keen sailor, we had boats on the Thames at various different times. Did a lot of dinghy sailing as well as motor sailing. Always loved being outdoors. And I think the other thing that I sort of, one connection between childhood and for me and gardening is to do with play. Because I realised, you know, when I was writing the book, I really tried to analyse my, what was going on for me when I was gardening because I'd never really noticed it particularly. I knew I felt better, but in the course of writing, I thought I've got to actually drill down into this and understand it.

6:26Sue Stuart-Smith:And I realized that when I was in the garden, in the veg garden particularly, which is sort of a bit more my patch, I had that same feeling like a child, like I had as a child, being lost in play. You know, when you feel you're in your own world, you feel safe, and you've got a sense of sort of freedom somehow, inner freedom, and your mind can just sort of wander as well. I think that's a lot of what gardening does for people. Other things can do that too. Obviously, play does it for kids. Creative crafts can do it too. Yeah. So when you were at university, you lost your father, is that right?

7:04Sue Stuart-Smith:Yeah, he died in my final year and he was ill on and off throughout my childhood. Okay. How formative was that for you in terms of what you do now? And did you get into gardening at that point? No, I didn't get into gardening immediately and it was very, very formative because actually I was doing an English degree. I was at Cambridge doing an English degree and I'd always loved literature but I'd also liked the sciences at school and I'd not been able to study both of them at A-level because of the timetable clash. So I went for the arts and towards the end of my English degree I was thinking I didn't quite know what I wanted to do.

7:45Sue Stuart-Smith:I'd always thought I'd be a journalist and I'd done some journalism and I began to feel, particularly with my father dying and spending a lot of time in hospital during that last year, I think I just began to feel I want to be doing something rather than writing about what other people are doing. If that makes sense. I want to be actually directly engaged and I want to work in some way with people and I'd always loved biology in chemistry. So I went back, having done my English degree, and did A levels, and then went to medical school in London. Wow, so that's quite a U-turn. Well, in some ways it was, in some ways it wasn't.

8:23Sue Stuart-Smith:I mean, for me, I think this divide between arts and sciences is such a sad thing. Yeah, it's a bit of an arbitrary one at times. It is an arbitrary one. And of course, I always knew, I was always interested in the mind. I'd studied Freud, rather strangely, as part of my English degree. All right. And so I'd developed that interest. And I think going into psychiatry was, for me, very much as connected to English as it was to medicine. Okay. Because you're always looking at people, hearing people's stories. You're always helping them explore their own stories. That's so interesting. You know, whether you become, I then became a psychotherapist as well, but even if you don't, as a psychiatrist, your first encounter with a patient is often quite long.

9:18Sue Stuart-Smith:It's usually an hour, an hour and a half. Yeah. And, you know, you review their whole life history. And sometimes you help people make connections that they've never seen before in their life. They've never sort of connected certain events with certain other events in their life. That's really interesting. I didn't see it as a separate, very different thing. So what was the actual journey into becoming a psychiatrist then? Well, it's quite a long training. Okay. I worked. I did it part-time. Okay. We had children by then. Ah. And, yeah, I was a student for a very, very long time. How long was it long then?

9:58Sue Stuart-Smith:And somewhere along the way I did a PhD as well. So I really am quite a... I like studying, just like I liked researching for my book. Yeah. So let's talk about your book then, The World Garden Mind, which was a kind of huge bestseller. Were you expecting that? No, of course not. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Why do you think it captured the imagination? And for those who aren't aware of it, could you just a quick synopsis of it? Yeah. Well, it is a book about gardening. It's also a book about the mind. Yeah.

10:32Sue Stuart-Smith:and I worked on it for about five years. I was still working in the NHS for a lot of that time. I did a lot of research. I really wanted, I felt if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it really well and really properly. I felt a lot of what existed already about gardening and its benefits. It was saying all the right things in many ways, but not really drilling down into the detail or kind of looking at some of the more, the deeper existential meanings that people get from working with nature. And I really wanted to understand that better. I'd grown up from my mother hearing the story of her father, my grandfather, who had been a prisoner of war during the First World War in Turkey.

11:22Sue Stuart-Smith:He'd been captured, he was a very young man and he was really lucky to survive like something like 70 % of prisoners of war didn't make it home so and he didn't talk about it much later but she she knew enough about it to sort of tell a bit of the story so he recovered afterwards having been very malnourished very traumatized through gardening he got the chance to go on a horticultural rehabilitation program At that point, I didn't know where that was or what it consisted of. And my mother was still alive when I started writing the book, so I went back and tried to find out as much as she knew.

12:04Sue Stuart-Smith:And then through my cousin as well, I found out a bit more. And then the Hampshire Gardens Trust helped me find the garden where he'd had that experience. And so that whole narrative is woven into the book. And that was really important for me, actually. How do you describe that connection between physically tending a garden, but also tending to your own inner life at the same time? So I think there are times in life when we have a lot to sort out internally, whatever the causes of that are. And I think that's when something like gardening can be really helpful. and I suppose I experienced that firsthand following a long period of stress in my work and I really began to notice if I went into work on a Monday and I hadn't been gardening, it was still as if I was sort of carrying the whole previous week on my shoulders.

13:05Sue Stuart-Smith:Whereas if I'd been gardening, somehow along, something happens in parallel I think, when we work with our hands. You're able to sort of, you know, metabolise things, turn them over, work them through a bit. Just being in nature is de-stressing and calming. And I think just also if you're feeling beleaguered and like, oh, everything's closing down or you're losing something or you've lost something, the very act of working with the natural growth force and the cycle of life, you know, intrinsically gives you a sense of something better to come, something good to come, you know. It might not give you hope, or you might call it hope, but at some level it's sort of getting you thinking about the future when perhaps you've been very, very preoccupied with the past, what's been going on in far past or recent past.

14:03Yeah. Is there a sort of flow thing to it?

14:05Sue Stuart-Smith:Absolutely, but I think flow is such a broad term. I don't think flow is the only thing that's going on. So from a physiological perspective, what's happening in the nervous system and the brain when you're gardening? Oh, I think lots of different things. But I think, you know, cardiovascular level, we know being out in nature, you... quite rapidly, actually, within minutes, you know, your blood pressure drops a bit, your heart rate settles down, your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels drop within about 30 minutes. And you can get that from being in a park, it doesn't have to be in a garden.

14:46Yeah.

14:47Sue Stuart-Smith:But I think the difference is the hands on, hands in the soil, we're getting also exposure to all the beneficial bacteria in the soil. And there are various theories about that. Yeah, so the micro...is it microbes? Yeah, microbes. One in particular, Mycobacterium vaccae, which has been linked to release of serotonin. It's quite hard to demonstrate in humans, but it's been shown in animal models. And I do think this thing of actually being part of nature... I think we can recover our own sense of... of our sort of biological, the fact that we're a biological being too, you know, and we're one of many inhabitants in a garden.

15:36Yes, exactly.

15:38Sue Stuart-Smith:And, you know, and I think that's something people often experience quite intensely during the pandemic. If they were, you know, people who were lucky enough to have a garden and people spent so much time in it and they suddenly realised how many birds visit and all the insects that are there, the butterflies and so on. So obviously the Japanese famously do forest bathing, don't they? Which is sort of walking in the woods and soaking in that very rich air that's in the woodlands. But would you say that you could even go as far as prescribing gardening or being outside as something that will help people who are struggling?

16:14Is that a thing that one could do? I think it's happening already. Is it? Yeah.

16:19Sue Stuart-Smith:Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a movement for green prescribing or green care. We have a social prescribing group in the plant library. And we set that up about six months ago. It took quite a while. You know, working with the NHS is a bit slow, but we've got it off the ground. And that particular group is for people recovering from cancer, cancer treatments. and they come and they engage one afternoon a week in gardening and other activities. And part of that is the grief effect, that they're often quite isolated and lonely and struggling. But a lot of it is also working with nature. So if somebody listening to this is struggling in some way, depression, anxiety, all these things that we do struggle with, what would you recommend to them?

17:18like where should they start if they're listening to this? How should they address nature in that way, in the right way?

17:24Sue Stuart-Smith:Well, I think if you want to join a community group, find out what's in your local area. There's now a fantastic online resource called Gardening for Health, with the digit four, which was set up by Richard Claxton, who's a GP and is now the director of the National Garden Scheme.

17:50Sue Stuart-Smith:and find out what's out there and be brave and go and sign up. If you've got your own garden and you've been not very engaged in it, try and re-engage. Yeah. Do you think it's even... Would you go as far as to say it could be an alternative to medication sometimes? I think that's one of the aims behind green prescribing and social prescribing, but it can equally be in addition to. Yeah, compliment. medication it doesn't have to be either or. But sometimes I think people are, you know, the prescription pad is reached for too quickly. So it's always worth exploring what the alternatives might be.

18:32Sue Stuart-Smith:And there's some great examples of, you know, there's the Lambeth GP Food Cooperative in London, where a group of GPs have set up gardens within their own practices. There's a lot of very interesting stuff going on. Have you seen any change in neurodiverse people and neurodivergents in terms of helping them specifically through gardens? One of our most frequent school visitors is our local learning disability school and we also work very closely with the charity Sunnyside Rural Trust who help adults with various neurodivergent issues and they have a little nursery behind which you probably saw.

19:16Yeah.

19:17Sue Stuart-Smith:So they're there five days a week. So absolutely I think one thing is very well documented is that particularly for people who suffer from sensory overload very easily. So you know being in busy streets or noisy rooms is really hard being out in the garden or in a natural setting is immediately much more calming and life becomes more manageable and they can sort of process their thoughts and feelings better. I think that's sort of quite well established now but it's a pity it's not more available. In terms of you and your own well-being, how often are you out in the garden? It varies enormously.

20:05Sue Stuart-Smith:On the time of year, how busy I am, how much I'm travelling. I travel quite a bit with the book still because it's come out in something amazing, like 18 languages. So it's still coming out in different places and you'll be on a world tour. It's still coming out in different places, yes. The latest one was Croatia. Wow. It's out in Ukraine. I haven't visited Ukraine, but I've done quite a lot of online talks and events for Ukraine. So it does depend how much I'm here. But yeah, I like to dip in. I don't like to lose contact altogether. And I'm still obsessed by sowing seeds. I always start in the early spring sowing seeds inside the house because I like to watch them germinate.

20:49And is there anything else that you do in a sort of ritualistic way, just for your own mind?

20:54Sue Stuart-Smith:I'm not a very routine person, I have to confess. I sort of, I like to, if I can, my best kind of days often unfold in a slightly unpredictable way. How do they? Because I can feel I can respond to, you know, what the weather's like. Yeah. So I'm not someone who will go for a walk at a set time every day. Yeah. But I might go out for a walk in the garden when the sun's out. Yeah. And I'll wait for the sun to come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hope it coincides with a gap in my schedule. That's quite good. It means you're malleable, right? Yes. I mean, if I've got something to do, I do it. You know, as I was writing my book, I was very disciplined about putting in good chunks of work, but I wasn't somebody who had to sit at my desk at sort of seven in the morning and do three hours.

21:46Sue Stuart-Smith:I like to wait for the inspiration as well. Is it the case that when you practise professionally, you also have to have done your own therapy? Is that true? Absolutely, to be a psychotherapist, yes. Yeah, yeah. I think going back to the routine thing as well, the life of a psychotherapist is very timetabled. Okay. You know, you have your patients at set times. So I think there's always been something to me when I'm not got that. I still have that to some extent, you know, that I have certain appointments. Then I really relish the freedom to think, you know, I'll do whatever I feel like doing in the other time, whatever's calling to me to do.

22:23Yeah, yeah. So in terms of your own life then, what's been the most difficult period for you? I mean, you know, it seems to me that if you help people professionally in this area, it's also because you understand it at quite a visceral level yourself. So, you know, what have been your own experiences around it yourself? I think recovering from losing my father was a big one.

22:51Sue Stuart-Smith:And in some ways you never fully recover, but sort of learning how to live with it and make sense of it. He was only 47 when he died. Was he? And I was very close to him, so it was a big, it was a very big loss. And I think, you know, different times in my life I felt it. But certainly when I had my own therapy, that was a large focus of it. Was it quite out of the blue for you, that then? I mean, him being so young. It wasn't out of the blue. He had a bone marrow disorder and he was ill on and off from when I was about seven. Oh, wow. So we knew he had this condition, but he was also a very fit, strong man.

23:42Sue Stuart-Smith:So, you know, he had various health crises and then he always recovered. So you sort of think somehow he'll go on recovering. Yeah. And then eventually it became clear that he wasn't going to. Yeah. And what about your mum then? Tell us a bit about her. So my mum lived to the age of 92. Oh, wow. And after about 15 years on her own, she remarried. So she had another 20-year-long marriage. My stepfather was wonderful. and so yeah I think and she loved gardening and one of the things I really noticed in her after my father died we moved to the Cotswolds and she took on a cottage which had a rather neglected garden about an acre of garden and I could see how much benefit she was getting and I was really interested in dealing with her mourning through all the sort of digging and clearing and replanting that she was doing.