20/05/2026
More reflections in Creativity and Wellbeing week: gardening! 👩🌾
Anyone who has dabbled in sowing some seeds or plopping some bulbs into holes in the autumn will know the sense of hope and anticipation at the start, excitement when little green shoots arrive 🌱 and pure unadulterated joy when the colourful display of flowers arrives or the first bite of a home grown tomato 🍅 (and the total rage when the slugs/greenfly/squirrels thwart you!). But it turns out that gardening brings more than (mostly) good feelings... there is an evidence base for the physical and mental health benefits!
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/7/e036923
tl;dr - gardening can improve reduce stress and bring a measurable improvement to depression. It can actually improve biomarkers such as cortisol levels, heart rate variability and dyslipidaemia. And it can have meaningful real world improvements for health outcomes for people with comorbidities such as cardiovascular disease, including reducing A&E attendances/unplanned primary care visits. 🚑
So after a challenging day why not soak up some of the soothing mental health effect, or benefit to long term muscle and bone health that comes with some green fingered activity. 🌱🌱
Objective To systematically identify and describe studies that have evaluated the impact of gardens and gardening on health and well-being. A secondary objective was to use this evidence to build evidence-based logic models to guide health strategy decision making about gardens and gardening as a no...
