Make your garden A PLACE OF well-being

In consultation with the senior horticultural therapist at Thrive, the national gardening charity, Annabelle Padwick offers some advice on how to adapt your garden to suit your physical needs Jan Broady, senior horticultural therapist at Thrive

- Annabelle Padwick 

I don’t know about you, but alongside browsing seed catalogues and plenty of pen circling, I see the chilly winter months as a chance to look over how the last growing year went – thinking about my harvests, disasters and also how my general garden design worked for me and my lifestyle. Once spring arrives, it’s non-stop gardening, so I like to use these early months to make any changes for the upcoming year.

While pondering my design changes, own fitness goals, time availability and vegetable growing ambitions for 2021, I decided to give Jan Broady a call to see if he had any tips for you and me about how we can make our gardens perfect for us and any personal well-being goals. Jan is a senior horticultural therapist at Thrive, the national gardening charity, and I have had the pleasure of chatting to him many times in person while exploring the charity’s gardens near Reading in Berkshire, so I knew he would be able to help.

Thrive does an annual survey and 100% of its client gardeners say their physical health has improved being out in the garden and 70% say that their physical health has improved a lot.

PHYSICAL BENEFITS

Generally, gardening without doubt has massive physical benefits for our health. It’s my gym, but without awkward mirrors and with many more rewards! What Jan and I both said about gardening for exercise is that there is a nurture element and a real product at the end, which makes it harder to notice the physical work sometimes. The garden encourages us to get outside, there is a purpose, an incentive, and if you keep it up, then trugs full of rewards result, as well as a healthy fitness level.