Royal Horticultural Society’s festival emphasises wellbeing benefits of activity
THE RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival was back in full blossom last week after being off for a year because of the pandemic.
It added to my sense of occasion to get up at 5am to catch the 7.02 train from Waterloo to Hampton Court and then walk by the Thames for a mile or so to make the 8am preview of the festival.
The message from the Royal Horticultural Society to British Asians especially is to take up gardening – this is good for you. It is often better than taking exercise and certainly improves mental health.
There is also an appeal to home owners not to concrete over their front gardens. This not only reduces the space available for gardening, but is also bad for drainage. Asians are particularly guilty of turning their front gardens into parking lots to accommodate his-hers Mercedes cars. His is invariably the bigger model.
RHS director of science and collections, Professor Alistair Griffiths, says: “A recent RHS science project has shown that adding a few plants to a bare front garden reduces stress levels by as much as eight mindfulness sessions. However, the fact that a third of front gardens is still mainly paved over is still pretty bleak, considering how easy it is to incorporate plants in any sized space. Combined with the increasing threat to parks and green spaces from the growing demand for housing, we know there is still much work to be done.”
Asians should have gardening in their genes since so many first-generation immigrants came from rural backgrounds in the Punjab. Maybe the skills were lost as the first generation often had to work in factories as an economic necessity. Today, gardening sometimes comes across as almost the preserve of the English middle classes, but the RHS now really wants to increase the diversity of its members.
During the pandemic those who had gardens realised how lucky they were. Gardening took off like never before. In 2020, the RHS website received more than 31 million unique visits compared to 19.9 million in 2019 – 57 per cent up – with a 100 per cent increase in traffic to its advice pages during the spring lockdown.
I made a point of lingering in the section of the Hampton Court Palace festival devoted to allotments, which brings together people from all sections of society. It was enlightening chatting to Zoe Claymore, who revealed she had given up her job as a social researcher in the civil service to become a garden designer.
The loss of two relatives had brought the realisation, “You have only one life,” she explained. She referred me to her website which was very encouraging. After the pandemic hit, she said “being outside and connecting with nature took on an even more significant meaning for me. Growing things went from a passion to bordering on an obsession.”
I spent part of the afternoon wandering from allotment to allotment, interviewing their proud gardeners. Alex Daisy and her husband, who told me about the “dig for victory” during the Second World War (when people were encouraged to grow potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips, turnips and swedes), were from the Fulham Palace Meadows Allotments. This has been going since 1916 and is now a 14-acre site with more than 400 plots. People are not allowed to dig deeper than two feet because there is evidence of a Roman settlement on the land, which was a gift from the Bishop of London.
I was pleased to see teachers introducing children from multicultural backgrounds to allotments. Space, as always, is getting scarcer. The pandemic has seen a surge in demand for indoor plants.
“Vertical gardening” is apparently not a new phenomenon, but this year I noticed a company called PlantBox which sells trays that can be fitted on top of each other. These trays can then be filled with soil and placed against a bare wall. The trays can then be used to grow either vegetables or flowers – even indoors – to create the illusion of a vertical garden. Simple, but clever.
In the “RHS garden for a green future”, designer Jamie Butterworth drew attention “to the impact the changing climate is having on UK gardens and gardeners”.
Maybe before too long we will be able to grow all the things we are familiar with in the Indian subcontinent or in East Africa – everything from mangoes to pineapple and banana. This is not necessarily an unalloyed blessing.
Butterworth makes the point: “Our gardens need to be versatile and filled with plants able to cope in diverse weather conditions, including harsh summer heat and lengthy periods of winter wet.”
A crashed aeroplane fuselage, marked “Homo Sapiens”, dramatically addressed the “6th mass extinction threat to our plant”. A yellow tape said it was a “crime scene”.
It was Alex Daisy who mentioned she always got her seeds from an Italian company called Franchi, which was established in 1783 and has been in the same family for seven generations. When I came across them, I wanted to buy some of their tomato seeds but was advised it was too late for this summer. I had kept my excess tomato seeds from last year – they had given a plentiful crop – in a safe place, so naturally I couldn’t find them. I insisted on buying some of Franchi’s tomato seeds anyway and will try growing them despite being told it is too late for this year.
Gardening is not without stress. I love dahlias, but two of them were devoured overnight by snails. I am not convinced by Monty Don’s advice on BBC Gardeners’ World last week that we must “learn to live with snails and slugs”.
But the RHS has done plenty of research to highlight the beneficial results of gardening. One “ground-breaking” study was conducted by the RHS in collaboration with the universities of Sheffield and Virginia.
According to RHS Wellbeing Fellow and lead author, Dr Lauriane Chalmin-Pui, “gardening every day has the same positive impact on wellbeing as undertaking regular, vigorous exercise like cycling or running. When gardening, our brains are pleasantly distracted by nature around us.
“This shifts our focus away from ourselves and our stresses, thereby restoring our minds and reducing negative feelings. Gardening is like effortless exercise because it doesn’t feel as strenuous as going to the gym, for example, but we can expend similar amounts of energy.”
