How to grow SOME JOY

There’s no better way to lift your spirits than digging soil and planting vegetables, says exec-turned-garden-lover Hollie Newton

We’ve all been there – the dreaded 1am wake up, staring at the ceiling, your mind running over every worry as the hours tick by. As more and more of us suffer from the emotional and physical effects of an increasingly exhausting modern life, maybe it’s time to turn to a more old-fashioned remedy.

If you’d told me 10 years ago that gardening would become my saviour, I would have laughed into my cocktail! After moving from my home in Dorset to London, I’d embarked on a career in advertising that saw me move quickly up the ranks. There was glamour but, for the most part, I spent 80 hours a week sat in a trendy office stressed out of my mind.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, a decade of constant pressure and anxiety had left me far from happy and, beneath my successful facade, I was crumbling.

I’d suffered from depression my entire adult life and, increasingly, found my attempts to hold it back were failing.

Then I started growing courgettes… Unlikely as it sounds, they saved me. Growing things – particularly edible things – became the outlet I didn’t know I needed. From learning to grow trailing tomatoes on my first rented balcony to the gradual transformation of my current city garden from post-apocalyptic wasteland into a vegetable-filled haven, my days spent pottering about in the soil have been some of my happiest.

It’s my sanctuary from a stressful life.

And I’m not the only one for whom life is absurdly stressful. A recent survey found that four in 10 UK women say they are ‘unable to describe themselves as happy’, while others report that poor