The Freudian Gardener

Like many another person, I like gardening. I even, occasionally, get to sit and enjoy it! I’m restless if I’m gardening. I always see the gaps; the unfilled spaces, the patch of untreated weeds. It’s a relief to visit a garden owned by somebody else.That’s not my responsibility. The convolvulus can climb to its heart’s content; the dandelions can glow and the couch grass can thrive. It’s not my problem! At home it’s a different story. Ask my wife, who, when I complain about how hard I’ve worked in the garden, reminds me that, “It’s your choice. You don’t have to!”. (You can see she’s not a gardener. Of course I have to do it! What would become of us if I didn’t spend a 37.5 hour week in the garden. Walt Disney observed “I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.” What he didn’t say was how much work is involved in making a wild garden look “natural”

Over the years I’ve read various gardening blogs, books and articles. I’ve looked ups which plants like a sunny spot in late October, Which plants are companions to a weeping copper beech. How to control my runaway geraniums. I’ve carefully measured the length of my border and noted its width. I’ve then got a sheet of graph paper and planned my garden. Down out each plant to scale. Penstemons here. Delphiniums there. Lillies at the back. All along the border in perfect rhythm and harmony. Season by season. It looked lovely. So I took my piece of graph paper with me and went to the Garden Centre. Came back with the complete border. Just put add soil, water and enjoy my G&T. Foolproof. Bob Flowerdew, eat your heart out. Only it didn’t quite work. Somehow my perfect border “didn’t feel the love”. Rather than a continuous river of flowing colour that changed with the seasons I ended up with a border of what appeared to be random plants in no particular sequence or connection.

Then I thought I’d do things my way. Instead of trying to plan a whole border, let alone a garden in advance, I decided to work with one small patch at a time. I took an existing feature – the patio with its Wisteria – and built around that. First with some perennial geraniums, then some clematis followed by some ferns in the shade of the fence. Then I moved from here across the bit of garden next to the patio. There was a determined peony already planted so I worked with this, adding plants as I moved up the garden. After two years I quite liked what I saw and followed the same principle throughout. That was twenty years ago and my garden is slowly filling up in a way that Disney would like. I certainly do.

For many years I worked as a psychiatric nurse. One essential task was to write what was called a Care Plan. This was considered to be at the heart of our nursing care. Every so often one was expected to sit down with one’s patient and write up a plan of their care. Typically one might say, “Michael will come for a cigarette every hour.” Or “Jane shall have 30 minutes escorted leave per shift.” This was duly agreed and signed by both parties and had pride of place in their nursing notes. What it didn’t say was what happened if Michael was asleep at nine in the morning and wanted his cigarette at half past nine – as agreed in his Care Plan. He would be told that he had missed his allotted time and to come back at ten. If he complained he stood a very good chance of being seen as aggressive, dangerous and threatening. This would then trigger a response from the nursing staff. Michael would find himself restrained, medicated and secluded. (“Teach him to keep to his boundaries. It says in his Care Plan that he can have a cigarette once an hour.”) Jane was equally likely to not get her walk. If the shift was too busy then her 30 minutes didn’t happen, and if she had the temerity to ask for an hour in the afternoon she was told that her walk was 30 minutes per shift. Nothing was carried forward. Having seen what happened to Michael, she was unlikely to demur! I mention these anecdotes because they chime with how I garden. And how I worked as a nurse and work now as a psychotherapist.

I never could write Care Plans. I saw them as a pointless waste of time. My Care Plans were mostly “Terry will meet Michael for an hour each week to talk.” It worked for me! I practice psychotherapy in the same way that I garden. I never sit down with my patient and draw up a Care Plan, I never set goals or give homework. I don’t do Learning Outcomes or build in Review dates. That’s the domain of my CBT colleagues who can work in that way. I can’t and don’t! I’m much more inclined to sit down and talk with my patient about their (internal) garden. About how difficult it can be to find a plant to fit a particular spot. Or how their Roses are now thriving since they started adding a regular potash feed. We’ll talk about how their father always forbade any gardening on a Sunday – and how difficult it has been to override that rule. Or how scared my patient was of roses when he was small. The thorns were sharp and seemed to be waiting for him to go past so they could scratch him.