Gardening IS the good life! ; Although, as one green-fingered writer explains, we don’t need ‘horticultural therapists’ to tell us so

GARDENS are good for you. Gardening is good for you. The scientists have announced it as a great discovery and there’s a new breed of ‘horticultural therapists’ to prove it.

Even looking at a garden can improve your attitude to life.

Dr Roger Ulrich, a leading researcher on the effects of environment, expresses amazement. ‘If researchers had proposed 20 years ago that gardens and gardening could improve medical outcomes, they would have met with derision and scepticism,’ he says.

However, this raises one question: did none of these unfortunate researchers own a garden?

Yesterday, I spent three hours in my garden in Dorset. I crawled along the ground, uprooting ground elder.

I deadheaded the roses, which are flowering for the third time.

I took off leaves from the vine so the grapes can see the sun and I can see them.

I hacked back the fig tree from the steps, trimmed the white japonica and tied back the passion flower, now a mass of heavy fruits.

After a tea break and a swift visit to the garden centre, I sneakily planted out some delphiniums and tucked into rather bare- looking flowerpots a dozen ravishing pansies.

Then I sat back in a deckchair and felt pleased with myself.

Let’s not be coy, I was happy. I had produced order where before there was disorder.

Francis Bacon, the Renaissance polymath, wrote: ‘God Almighty first planted a garden.

And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks.’ THAT is the real point: whereas a building is manmade, a garden is a co- operative venture between man and nature.

The gifted gardener doesn’t impose his or her will but helps the plants find their way to a satisfying shape.

The English have always been passionate gardeners, although we owe our early interest to the conquering Romans, who were keen on fruit-bearing trees.

Medieval monasteries elaborated the tradition, and the first books on gardening came out in the 16th century. One, by Thomas Tusser, was written entirely in verse. There’s a challenge for Alan Titchmarsh.

I grew up in a family of gardeners so from my earliest days I saw the beneficial effects of an afternoon wrestling with the weeds.

Both my grandmother’s and mother’s favourite reading were rose catalogues, and they competed and encouraged each other to more charming or rare varieties.

I have inherited a Banksia rose, which spreads over one side of my house, taken from a cutting from my mother’s garden and I have a myrtle from my grandmother’s garden – cuttings from the same shrub were used in my mother’s wedding bouquet in 1931.

Gardens can even act as a living diary. Four of the trees in my garden were planted to celebrate the births of children.

As a child, I didn’t see the point of gardening. I noted the wrestling aspect and wouldn’t even be bribed to help.

Doubtless I would have been less filled with teenage angst if I had appreciated the psychic health-giving properties of making order out of a mess.

Gardening may be good for you but it’s also hard work – at least my sort of gardening. Did I mention the brambles, nettles and mint gone to seed I also removed yesterday afternoon?

I guess this is not exactly what the doctors had in mind when they described the sense of ‘being in control’ that comes to patients who are introduced to the joy of growing their own plants. Or perhaps they stick to flowers in pots.

My garden has never been totally in my control. In fact, if I hadn’t long ago given up expecting perfection, I would have given up gardening, too.

I had to give up reading calendars about when to plant this, and that because I was always at least two months behind. I’m the gardener you spot buying sweet-peas when everyone else is on to chrysanthemums.

In London, I have a flat with a very small roof terrace and I get almost as much pleasure from cramming it full with flowers from the Portobello Market as I do from my proper garden. At least, ground elder hasn’t found its way up four floors yet.

Garden centres are the growth business of this century.

Just as my mother and her mother read catalogues avidly, I walk through the rows of roses, thorns and all, telling myself, of course, that I’m only there for the outing.

It is very difficult not to go over the top with flowers. Poor Prince Charles was made out to be an absolute fool with his talkingtoflowers advice.

Yet, as so often in his life, he’s being proved right.

Flowers have special properties that we need to be in touch with.

Recently, a friend advised me to ask a flower’s permission before pulling it out. It will come much more easily, she assured me, and, I think she’s right.

I’m sure the huge popularity of the Flower Fairy series coincides with our ever-increasing love of our gardens or the public garden round us. Fairies and flowers are inextricably mixed.

Shakespeare’s most famous fairy, Ariel, sang: “Where the bee sucks, there lurk I;/ In a cowslip’s bell I lie.’ What a wonderful image! And yes, cowslips, once growing anonymously in secret corners of fields, are now for sale in market gardens.

It is as if the more our population is concentrated in towns and cities, the more aware we are, and appreciative, of nature.

AND THAT includes watching gardening programmes. I don’t know whether the scientists suggest that patients switch on to half an hour of The Perfect Herbaceous Border or Grasses With Everything, but I find them extremely soothing.

It is probably quite daring these days to suggest that being in touch (literally) with nature also puts you in touch with a great creator. But there’s no doubt that the perfection of a single flower petal does induce such grandiose thoughts.

In the past, there was a whole religious iconography of flowers, particularly with regard to Our Lady. For example, she had her ‘cushion’, Thrift; her ‘mantel’, Ipomeia; her ‘ nightcap’, Canterbury Bells and her ‘thimbles’, Campanula.

As a writer, I spend hours in front of a computer, eyes glued to black words and a winking black cursor. If I drift my gaze out to the garden, I immediately feel a change in my heartbeat, a peaceful slowing that lasts for at least a line or two.

It is seldom that the doctors tell us that something that feels good actually is good, but in this case the theory and the reality coincide.

Today, I have resolved that for every hour on the computer, I’ll spend an hour in the garden.

My work rate may go down but my quality of life will soar.