Connecting with nature: Getting your hands dirty in the garden is good for the body and soul

Peter Dowdall on how getting our hands dirty in the garden can help balance our bodies and minds

I’VE spent a lot of time recently thinking about our relationship as humans with the garden.

I created a pop-up garden in Dublin city centre recently to launch the Bord na Mona Growise #LoveYourGarden campaign to illustrate the potential of even the smallest of gardening/outdoor spaces. Whether it’s an apartment balcony, a small terrace garden or even a space under the stairs, there’s an opportunity for everyone to make a big impact with the smallest and sometimes strangest, of spaces

Now, Dublin is a truly beautiful city and its lovely to walk around any urban space at the crack of dawn before it fills up with people doing their thing, but it really struck me, as we were constructing the garden on South King St, that everyone walking past was either stuck to their smartphone, or walking with glum faces or both. There was very little happiness about.

This is an immensely wealthy capital city in a first world country where it appears that everybody has access to all that they could ever want. Why then all the unsmiling and stern faces? With city living comes a stated increase in standard of living, but how is that standard measured?

Does increased urbanisation lead to increased mental health problems? Loneliness, drug abuse or just general unhappiness? Have we completely lost sight of what is all around us?

The power of simply being outside cannot be overstated in terms of the benefit to our mental health. We won’t find too many truly meaningful answers on the screens of our phones, but you would be amazed at what can be found by getting your hands dirty in the soil of the garden.

I love cities, don’t get me wrong, (and I suppose Dublin would be the second greatest city in Ireland), but everything needs a balance. We are creatures of the soil, to the earth we will return, and yet so many of us have no respect for it while we are on it.

If you don’t believe me then take the opportunity to get outside this weekend, dig a hole in the garden, and put a plant in that hole, pull some weeds; don’t be afraid to get mucky — you have a fine hot shower inside.

If you’ve never tried it before, or even if you have, remind yourself how good it feels to reconnect with Mother Nature outside. Take a trip to the local garden centre and treat yourself and your garden to a trolley full of colour. There’s lots of it available at the moment as we travel at pace once more towards another summer.

Ideally, the summer flowering lilies should have been planted in bulb form earlier in the spring but if you didn’t get around to it, I saw some bulbs available at a centre recently and they were as they should be.

By that I mean they didn’t come wrapped in plastic and attached to a laminated colour label, the only packaging they had was some sawdust.

They were still in perfect condition and the new shoots were beginning to emerge. If you see some available and if they are firm to the touch then, really, its hard to find better value.

Bring them home, dig a hole about three times the depth of the bulb and fill the bottom third with pure grit so that the roots of the plant don’t end up sitting in a pool of water, if our summer ends up being too wet. Or, put them is a decent pot and wait for the first shoots.

Gardening itself is a very straightforward pursuit, as basic as eating and drinking, but confusion often sets in when we humans get involved, particularly in the naming of plants.

What I and most people mean when we refer to lilies are plants of the Lilium genus. There are many species of Lilium and these species are further divided into hundreds of varieties. If that’s not confusing enough, there are many other plants which people will refer to as lilies, such as the Princess Lily, Lily of the Nile, St Anthony’s Lily and many more.

If you feel that lily blooms are just a bit too showy, dare I use the word, brash, then look for something that is that bit more subtle, like the Martagon Lilies.

Not likely to be available now in bulb form, any you come across will probably be growing in pots. They produce beautiful tall stems with many blooms on each stem. They’re available in many colours and not scented, but they make up for that with their visual display.

Do yourself a favour by getting your hands dirty now and once more during the summer, your garden will lift the spirits with masses of colour.