It's a Weed - It's a Voodoo Doll - It's Stress Therapy!
Gardens and gardening are good for the soul. They deal with life, with living things, with creating beauty. They force us to think in terms of harmony -- working in tune with the seasons, learning to accept the vagaries of nature, to play whatever hands we are dealt. There may be death in the garden, but there is also rebirth, no matter what disaster befalls us. There is always work to be done in the garden. More important, there is always hope in the garden.
The benefical effects that gardening has on our psyche is so strong that it has long been used as part of the therapy for the emotionally ill. As early as 1768, doctors were prescribing 'tending the soil' as a cure for ills of the mind and nervous system. A hospital in Pontiac, Michigan has been using gardening as therapy since the late 1800s. Originally mental patients were simply used to help tend the kitchen gardens so that all could eat. But experts soon noticed that the patients on garden duty were getting well much more quickly than those assigned other tasks.
It wasn't just because they were out in the fresh air. Being assigned to the garden meant patients were nurturing something other than their woes. The acts of turning the soil and watering the seeds forced thought outward. And it gave the patients, who watched their efforts turn into something useful, something that would feed and nurture them in its turn, the even more important feeling of being needed.
Watching the little green things grow and prosper also leads to a feeling of accomplishment, and an increased sense of responsibility - a great thing for those with low self-esteem. Plants are non-judgmental; they don't care what we look like, or even who we are. They simply care about the quality of the attention they receive, and respond accordingly. Pay attention to them and your garden grows. As the garden grows and prospers, so does self-confidence.
Many of the activities required in gardening, from prying up large rocks to making suitable planting holes to pulling weeds and pruning are not only acceptable ways of working off aggression, but also positive contributions to the landscape. So, in gardening, we learn to channel our hostility into positive action.
Charles Lewis of the Morton Arboretum, when working with high-rise public housing projects in both New York and Chicago found that a particularly effective way
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