I found the winter hard. I desperately missed my friends and family. Although I still had virtual contact with them, I missed being WITH them.

For Christmas my family gifted me some gardening gloves. At first, I thought they were paddle boarding gloves. I’ve always loved nature, but my relationship with nature has largely been running, hiking, paddling, climbing...going out to play in nature.

I’d spent very little time tending to my own garden. It always seemed like the sort of garden that took care of itself.

As I immersed myself in the research exploring how nature benefits our mental health - I also put on my gardening gloves and started to take a bit more care of my garden.

One day I sent my Mum a photo of an unfamiliar stem sprouting up. My text read

“Is this a weed?”

Her reply

“A weed is anything growing in a place where you don’t want it to grow.”

I thought about that for a while. The garden offers so many great metaphors for our mind. Sometimes we have to weed out some of our unhelpful thoughts, to nurture the ones we want to grow.

I’m still a novice when it comes to gardening. But at the start of a very busy week talking about mental health, I decided to spend just a couple of minutes pulling weeds from my garden.