The Well Gardened Mind
SUE STUART-SMITH
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 352 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064
There is only one problem with reading this delightfully titled and delightful book. And it is one the author, Sue Stuart-Smith, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist who is married to the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, herself identifies on page 182.
At the start of her chapter on “War and Gardening”, in which she describes how soldiers fashioned flowerpots from spent German shell casings in the First World War, she admits: “More than once in the course of writing this book I have felt rueful about sitting at my desk while Tom was outside in the sunlight getting on with things in the garden.”
Her plea that we need to rediscover nature in the modern world is so powerfully argued that I too wondered why I was sitting indoors reading her book on a sunny afternoon, rather than grabbing a trowel and digging as if my life depended on it.
