Heroes Not Zombies

I was never a gardener. I didn’t grow up in the tradition of gardening and for many years I lived in a top floor apartment with no garden. But since I retired and moved to rural France I’ve become a gardener.

It began with living in a house surrounded by vineyards and in a climate which drew me outside pretty much every day. I’d eat in the garden throughout the summer and I’d take a book outside to sit under the mulberry tree and read. I started to notice the birds which lived there or came to feed there and I’d notice the changes in all kinds of plants through the cycle of seasons.

I bought a battery operated lawnmower and found I’d enjoy listening to podcasts as I cut the grass. Cutting the grass would take between an hour and an hour and a half, an ideal podcast length of time!

We planted some vegetables in a “potager”, and I was amazed at the taste of fresh tomatoes, courgettes, lettuce, radishes and cucumbers. We planted a fig tree which quickly began to offer an abundance of fruit. Have you ever tasted figs just plucked from the tree? Amazing.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to Nature, never felt more in Nature at any other time in my life.

Now I’ve moved and bought a house in a small hamlet in the countryside. I’m no longer surrounded by vines, but by trees and fields. This house has a big garden and it’s needing to be reclaimed, to be re-inhabited. There’s still plenty of grass to cut, but no potager yet, and it has a significant area of overgrown trees – a little forest really. Most of the plants here have arrived without the assistance of human hands so there are surprise discoveries every week, different kinds of wild orchids, massive roses, sprawling ivy, wild clematis and honeysuckle.

This is not a garden which is ever going to be “finished”. Is any garden? It’s to be lived in, enjoyed, nurtured and cared for.

And there’s my greatest lesson I’ve learned from gardening. You can’t force it. You don’t fix it. It isn’t a giant machine with parts which need replaced or repaired.

To enable a garden to flourish you have to live with it, over time, get to know it and understand it. You have to “attend” to it, pay an engaged, committed attention to it. You have to care about, and for, it. You have to nurture it……especially the soil.

I think my work as a doctor was like that too. I knew that true healing only occurred when the individual patient was attended to, understood, cared for and nurtured. I knew that it wasn’t me who healed, nor was it any drug or procedure. It was the natural ability of a living organism to self-repair, self-heal and to grow and flourish. It was my job to support and facilitate that through long term healing relationships and by helping people to understand why they were suffering and what they might do to live differently, and thrive.

So there are threads in common here, between my work as a doctor, and my recent experiences as a gardener. Paying a particular kind of attention is perhaps the main one. Our left hemisphere facilitates a narrow, analytical focus on parts, helps us to grasp and manipulate the world. But left to itself, it produces a false sense of control and power, a false view of reality. Our right hemisphere enables us to have engaged attention. It helps us to find connections, to discover uniqueness, promotes a sense of wonder and wholeness. It helps us to “attend” to the real world directly.

Whether in gardening, or in Medicine, it turns out it’s best to use the whole brain, but to allow the right hemisphere to integrate all the activities of both sides. That allows us to realise life is not about fixing and controlling. It’s about the creation of caring relationships, attending and tending to, learning and growing together.

At least, that’s how it seems to me.