Sue Stuart-Smith – författare

‘The wisest book I’ve read for many years … Much more than a gardening book, much more than a guide to mental health … Hugely recommended’ Stephen Fry THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 How can gardening relieve stress and help us look after our mental health? What lies behind the restorative power of the natural world? In a powerful combination of contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis and brilliant storytelling, The Well Gardened Mind investigates the magic that many gardeners have known for years – working with nature can radically transform our health, wellbeing and confidence.With illuminating stories of how people struggling with stress, depression, trauma and addiction can change their lives, this inspiring and wise book of science, insight and anecdote – now translated into fifteen languages – shows how our understanding of nature and its restorative powers is only just beginning to flower.

A book about how the garden is a vital place of escape for the brain, and how it helps us shape our minds through action as well as thought.Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities. For many people, apart from having children and raising a family, the process of creating or tending a plot is one of the most significant things in their lives. With the natural rituals of growth, decay and regeneration, safety and enclosure, destruction and renewal, it is as if – alongside the physical activity – we are also gardening our minds. And yet we understand so little about it.`The Well-Gardened Mind’ investigates how an immersion in gardening can affect our inner worlds, both consciously and unconsciously, and how it can help us to find or re-find our place in the world. As current horticultural projects that work with general mental health problems as well as specific ones, such as addiction, refugees and PTSD demonstrate, the garden is intrinsically linked to our capacity for self-reflection and creative thinking. Combining contemporary neuroscience and psychoanalysis with compelling real life stories, prominent psychiatric psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith shows how many of the physical and mental processes involved in gardening are ones that are recognised as facilitating neural change.

‘The wisest book I’ve read for many years … Much more than a gardening book, much more than a guide to mental health … Hugely recommended’ Stephen FryTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERA Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020How can gardening relieve stress and help us look after our mental health? What lies behind the restorative power of the natural world?In a powerful combination of contemporary neuroscience, psychoanalysis and brilliant storytelling, The Well Gardened Mind investigates the magic that many gardeners have known for years – working with nature can radically transform our health, wellbeing and confidence.With illuminating stories of how people struggling with stress, depression, trauma and addiction can change their lives, this inspiring and wise book of science, insight and anecdote – now translated into fifteen languages – shows how our understanding of nature and its restorative powers is only just beginning to flower.

One of Garden & Gun’s Favorite Books of 2020 A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self. Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think. Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives.

Im Garten finden viele Menschen Entspannung, schöpfen neue Kraft und kommen zur Ruhe. Der Prozess des Pflanzens und Pflegens, Säens und Erntens beeinflusst unser Wohlbefinden, unsere Fähigkeit zur Selbstreflexion und unsere Kreativität. Gartenarbeit ist aber auch ein bewährtes Heilmittel zur Behandlung vieler psychischer Probleme – von Sucht- und Angststörungen bis hin zu Depressionen und Traumata. In diesem Buch zeigt die Psychiaterin und begeisterte Gärtnerin Sue Stuart-Smith, wie sich die Natur positiv auf unsere innere Welt auswirkt, uns Inspiration bietet und den Geist bereichert.