Who needs the gym or medicines when there's a garden waiting for you? Monty Don extols the healthy benefits of feeling at one with nature.*
I have a fail-safe measure of how angry, distressed, exhausted or just plain ill I am. I put on my boots (an important part of the ritual this - I am symbolically strapping on my necessary armour), go outside and start to garden.
This might be gentle pottering about, a little light pruning, watering the greenhouse,thinning a line of beetroot, mowing or perhaps vigorously turning the compost or digging the vegetable garden. The point is not what I do, but the simple fact I am doing something in my garden. If after 10 minutes I feel less than utterly content, I know that something is seriously wrong.
Gardening - for me at any rate- works like a magical elixir. It heals, almost instantly. Of course, it is much better not to need healing from any kind of hurt. The best health of all is the kind that you do not notice or need to think about. A body and mind working well never need to consider how they are doing, just the matter in hand.
I would argue that the best road to sound mental and physical health comes from a good diet based on fresh, seasonal food, plenty of outdoor exercise, a small amount of stress and an active interest and stake in the future. Gardening fulfils all those requirements and is consequently the healthiest of all pastimes.
I also think that gardens are where we feel most free. Modern life is, for the majority of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. We have more time and money than ever before, and yet most of us have little sense of control over our lives. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that gives us a real stake in the planet. The garden is not just the grass to be morn and the straggle of weeds to be pulled from between the paving, but the sky and the rain and the birds singing from the bushes - our bushes.
Gardens are places where we can connect with the weather, the seasons and the natural rhythms of plants and animals. We all lead such hermetic lives, wrapped in central heating, air conditioning, cars, trains, neon-lit offices, street lights and a constant supply of cheap gratification, that it is possible not to experience anything at all directly.
A garden - however small - is the corrective to this ersatz existence. Gardens are wet and cold and bathed in sun and, despite all our worst endeavours, continues to obey the cycles of nature. To be out there and doing something is deeply empowering because you become part of that rhythm.
Certainly by far the most immediate effect of time in the garden - and this includes everything from house plants to allotments - is to wash away the stress of modern life. We are living longer than ever before, but for many people the quality of life is getting worse. We live in an age driven by haste and a sense of forces we cannot control.
Apparently simply walking on grass in bare feet can help, it's good for lowering blood pressure and heart rates and stress levels. And most people believe that being surrounded by grass, trees and flowers improves their health and general well being.
This is hardly rocket science but it is a much under-praised and under-encouraged aspect of gardening.
More young people are living in a permanently heated, artificially lit world insulated from weather or the changing cycle of growth. Yet a very cursory relationship with a garden will provide the most direct contact with the natural world available to most people. The simplest garden can connect people to a living world that has infinitely more depth and meaning.
To put it at its simplest, gardening does us good at every level - from the exercise needed throughout the changing seasons to grow it, to the pleasure and health-giving properties when eating it, to the greater desire to share what we grow ourselves, and therefore to improve our social health. Wise men and women have known and practised this for millennia - but how many of our modern politicians grow their own?
Even if you turn your back of the health-giving properties of a veg patch, just being outside can be life changing. We need the benefit of daylight to improve our mood and being out in the open can only help.
Beneath the joy and endless satisfaction I get from almost every aspect of gardening, whether in my own private garde at home or shared with millions via the TV, is a real and urgent need to preserve my health and sanity through the healing balm of the garden. This is a mad, dangerous and cruel world we live in, and if we want to cope with its horrors and relish the profound joys that are there to be had, then a garden is the best place to start - and to end.
* taken from an article in Gardeners' World, February 2006.
If you don't have a garden - or you do and have lots of energy, would like fun and to meet people - see: http://www.tcv.org.uk/greengym
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