At home with Jackie The amazing healing power of a garden

The return from a spell in hospital has JACKIE FRENCH acutely attuned to the earthy, wondrous, sensual pleasure of being in her garden

The scent hit me as soon as my husband, Bryan, opened the car door. I’d been in hospital too long, surrounded by the smells of air conditioning, antiseptic and plastic hot-food covers. Suddenly, the air was not just fresh, but filled with all the perfumes of a garden – soil and mulch, leaves and grass – and, yes, each one had its own scent. It wasn’t rose season, when the air here is like a perfume counter. The fragrant wintersweet hadn’t yet bloomed, nor had the ‘Erlicheer’ daffodils. Gardens don’t need strong perfumes to smell good. They simply do. We humans evolved with soil and growing things around us. I found I was breathing deeply instead of trying to block out odours.

There were the garden sounds, too. Not just the absence of alarms and the 20 TV sets along the corridor, but the almost subliminal ones that breeze among the branches, and the birdsong that’s so wonderfully irregular, you need to turn all your senses on to hear them, instead of trying to block out sound and smell.

A garden makes you present in the moment. So much of modern life needs to be shut out. But sit yourself in the garden in the winter sunlight, or the dappled leaf shade in summer, and simply be, watching lizards sunbake or bowerbirds steal the cumquats, and all your senses come alive again.

Skin is a sense, too, one we mostly forget when we’re indoors, unless we’re

in a draught. But in the garden, your skin feels warmth or the tickle of a cold breeze – and even howling gales, thunderstorms or heatwaves (which is why we have a house as well as a garden).

Light is different in the garden, too. Indoors, it’s either light or dark, whereas gardens are dappled, their colours changing from dawn to midday to dusk.

The next garden joy I experienced was food. An apple pie that tastes of preservatives is not like an apple plucked from the tree in your garden; one carefully saved, in a re-usable calico bag, from the parrots and possums until it reaches perfect ripeness. Those who don’t eat homemade food may be so used to preservatives, they no longer notice them, but the preservative flavour is still there.

You need a garden to make ‘bottom of the garden’ soup – a vegetable soup made with whatever is in abundance. I suddenly craved plain, freshly dug spuds, scrubbed and baked in their jackets.

And there were the flowers. Yes, I loved every florist box… but I love even more the single, slightly frosted rose or the camellia edged with bird footprints that Bryan brings in. Every day something different will bloom as the season progresses – nerines today, tomorrow camellias, and next week a different variety of camellia.

But as I lie here for a while yet, in a room with two walls of windows, watching a pair of hormone-demented lyrebirds chase each other under the lemon trees, listening to the owl that perches each night in the pear tree only 2m (and a wall) behind my bed, something more profound is happening.

The trees are bare now. The autumn leaves lie piled as mulch. But as I watch, day by day, the branch tips change colour from brown to green or red. In a couple of months, green shoots will appear, then leaves will grow, the fruit will swell and, possibly, probably, my body will do the same, regenerating as well.

This is the greatest gift of any garden. To everything there is a season, a time to sow, a time to harvest, a time to wait, a time to simply watch the garden and feel it heal the soul – and the body.

I am human, and humans created gardens to include the flowers, fruit, scents, dappled light and grassy glades we love best. Happiness is a garden.