8 minute read
GARDENING for everyone’s WELLBEING
Gardening is exercise and wellbeing wrapped up in one. It can result in a sense of accomplishment and a sense of wonder. We meet three gardeners from three islands who share the goodness that community gardening has given them.
Coming across a community garden’s street stall is what drew 78-year-old Dunedin local Beverley Crawford into community gardening. She missed growing gooseberries since a visit from the gooseberry blight wiped all hers out a few years ago. So when she saw an unnamed plant that looked a bit like a gooseberry bush for sale, she snapped it up, keen to give it another go. ‘Actually, I don’t know if it’s a gooseberry or a Worcesterberry, so I’ll have to wait until it fruits. They’ve got quite fierce little prickles on them, but they’re profuse fruiting and growing. I guess the flavour is blackcurrant-y. They’re very moreish.’
Bev has been going to the Green Island Community Gardens, on and off, over the year. On their social media, the group refers to itself as a ‘communitybased initiative to grow veges, make friends, learn about gardening and help feed our GI’.
Beverley says the company is the best thing about community gardening. ‘Everyone is so lovely. Everyone chats to everyone. I’m quite old, you see. As you get older, you’ve got to keep trying to find new friends because everyone’s died or gone into homes.’
Ten years ago, Beverley was diagnosed with type 2. She refers to her diabetes as a ‘pest’, but she doesn’t spend too long worrying about it. Her background working as a counsellor and ESL teacher has taught her the importance of patience and taking each day as it comes.
Working amongst nature is the perfect antidote to depression, she says. ‘When you get stuck in, and you come to again, you don’t know if you’ve been gardening for hours because you go into another world completely. It feels like it’s only five minutes.’ She likens it to meditation: ‘Just let nature flow into you. And that’s the healing of everything, I think.’
Bev’s advice to anyone struggling with mental or physical health is to get outdoors and clear your mind of everything. ‘You get such a collection of rubbish in your head that goes round and round and takes energy. I always tell people, don’t think – just smell, just listen, and just feel. And all the healthy real things will come into you.’
Paula McEwan (Ngāi Tahu) is a complete convert to community gardening. Although she started going to Awatea Community Gardens in Porirua a couple of years ago, she says she grappled with learning the new skill. Paula is a rongoā practitioner at Te Whare Marie, a specialist kaupapa Māori mental health service within Kenepuru Hospital. Although comfortable in the ngahere (bush), harvesting and brewing, she says she struggled with the art of cultivating in the māra (garden). Since joining the gardens, she
Do something that takes your being over. Let nature and the plants do it for you. All the healing is there, if you just get all the other rubbish in your mind out of it. Don’t think, just smell, look, and do. – BEV CRAWFORD
has been busy sharing knowledge and making friends with other gardeners and like-minded people. Her advice to rookies is that it should never be a forced thing. If you don’t have a green thumb, a community garden gives you the support systems to gently ease your way into it. Awatea offers workshops, and Paula is excited to attend one shortly on foraging. ‘It looks like it’s just grass, but apparently there’s a lot of kai in there. And all the weeds I’ve been pulling probably aren’t weeds at all. It’s all food.’
Paula was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in October last year and in that short time has managed substantial lifestyle improvements that have sent her diabetes into remission. A significant achievement, considering her doctor told her that only one percent of those with type 2 in her neighbourhood ever managed their diabetes into remission.
When she was diagnosed, Paula says she realised that, when she went to the supermarket, everything she had previously put in her trolley had sugar in it. The new diagnosis became an awakening – an understanding of the need to eat more greens. This is what made Paula want to get amongst her local community gardens.
Paula quickly started to notice the difference in taste between supermarket and locally grown produce. ‘When drawing from the garden, everything is alive and fresh. My salads look like they are singing, especially when harvested from the gardens.’
Sometimes, I don’t feel like going. But every time I leave the gardens, I always feel lighter and brighter. – PAULA McEWAN
Paula has also discovered the enjoyment of accidental exercise. When she started at the gardens, she found bending over to weed really uncomfortable. But since her lifestyle turnaround, she has become fitter and stronger and says she can garden for longer.
‘Sometimes, I don’t feel like going. But every time I leave the gardens, I always feel lighter and brighter.’
Chris Jordan Clark has been gardening since studying horticulture in the 1980s. The College of Horticulture’s gardens naturally turned into community gardens when the students needed to practice their modules on germination, cuttings, and grafting. She says that in the seasons following each module, the campus would transform with beautiful flowers and plants everywhere. And then at harvest time, the surrounding community would come in and help, and then get to take some plants and produce home.
Chris now lives in northern Tasmania and relishes the distinct changes in the seasons, something she missed out on when she lived in New South Wales. She and her two closest neighbours all enjoy gardening, so much so that they’ve hung an ice cream container from a shared fence where they can all deposit excess produce. One neighbour grows excellent tomatoes, lemons, and broad beans to share. Chris and her husband find they have an excess of limes, coriander, and parsley. The other neighbour offers more tomatoes, lemons, and succulent cuttings.
She believes gardening is something you can obtain mastery over. It’s a skill, she says, but it’s not as hard as learning a language. It’s just practising and persevering. ‘It’s a matter of experimenting. And when you find the thing that you can do, it’s a joy.’
Chris says that gardening is a thing that is easy to be successful at. ‘That is very important if you think you’re failing at being a human, by being sick, or getting this diagnosis of a thing you can’t really get a handle on, and suddenly becoming very medicalised.’
Like Beverley and Paula, Chris believes that gardening is great for cheating exercise. ‘It gives you movement without you thinking about it. You don’t think, “I’ve taken 500 steps just organising putting those seeds in pots and moving them to a place, and then getting the hose”.’ She calls it ‘exercise, but in a non-exercise-y way’.
The physical benefits are obvious, but gardening is also beneficial for mental and emotional wellbeing. Chris finds plants to be therapeutic because they’re undemanding and non-verbal. ‘All they want is a drink and a feed. They don’t ask things of you like people do. Even the people who love you can be demanding if they think you’re unhappy or suffering. They want that reassurance you’re going to be all right. Plants aren’t like that. They don’t ask stuff of you.’
Having lived through a tragedy, Chris says she knew she was coming out of it when she started to care for the plants again. ‘When I didn’t just look at the garden and think, “meh”. When I started to think, “I could put a pot of pansies there.” That was when I thought something has shifted.’
Her advice to new gardeners is to find something that marks the seasons because then you always have something to look forward to. Bulbs are an obvious choice as they can be grown in a pot or in a garden or even in a lawn. They are fairly fast-growing and resilient.
Dahlias are another forgiving, wind-hardy, and long-flowering plant that is happy in a pot or in the ground. Many make good cut flowers for a vase, allowing you to bring some joy of nature indoors.
Even if it’s just growing radishes in a pot on the balcony or getting a sunflower to flower, it’s a thing you can achieve. It feels like you did it all yourself. – CHRIS JORDAN CLARK
