Dig for therapy

The Victoria Cross variety of the ‘sleepy poppy’, Papaver somniferum

We all like to think we are good for our gardens, but are our gardens good for us? They sting us, give us creeping arthritis and the occasional rash, but fundamentally we are grateful to them, whatever the weather brings. As Bing Crosby well puts it in the film High Society, they are “positively therapeutic”.

Next Thursday, on the Remembrance Day for our war-dead, the therapeutic effects of gardening will be honoured in an unusual little ceremony. In the walled garden of the Scottish Agricultural College at Auchincruive in Ayrshire, retired army padre Jim Smith OBE of the Parachute Regiment will be holding a commemoration service with some special war veterans gathered in Scotland’s national collection of flowering poppies. The 67 poppy varieties include a Victoria Cross form of the “sleepy poppy” with a rare white cross on its scarlet petals. They have just become 68 with the addition of the scarlet Falklands poppy, a frilled “super-poppy” variety which was named to honour the 25th anniversary of the Falklands campaign. It is to be the symbol of this year’s remembrance. However, the veterans present will not be natural rememberers. They are sufferers from PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, the legacy of their intense experiences in battle. Through gardening they have begun to find the therapeutic route to normality, which happily-weary gardeners like you and I recognise in our own lives.

Three years ago, Anna Baker Cresswell began her charity, Gardening Leave, in the belief that “horticultural therapy” might be a way out of soldiers’ PTSD. Now in her early forties, she is admirably forthright about her aims and ideas and “naturally bossy”, as she describes her impressive practicality. Since 2007, Gardening Leave has already helped 200 veterans with individually targeted work and social support. It has grown to employ nine salaried staff and to deploy an annual budget of £300,000, all of it fund-raised by Anna and her team.

Gardening Leave founder Anna Baker Cresswell in front of the walled garden

City livery companies have been increasingly quick to see the scope of the programme, and their donations have been strengthened by grants from the Duke of Westminster’s Westminster Foundation. The initial Ayrshire site has led to two more, one near Erskine Hospital outside Glasgow and the other in the very heart of horticulture, the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. It is within wheelbarrow distance of the site of the Chelsea Flower Show, a traumatic event of a very different type. The lieutenant general of the hospital, major general Currie, has invited Gardening Leave to colonise a shed and some surrounding ground in the justified belief that the hospital has been doing more for elderly soldier-pensioners than for a younger intake with mental difficulty.

Where did the idea come from, I asked Anna? PTSD used to be called shell shock or “neurasthenia”, but it became famous in the wake of the Vietnam war. It is particularly common in wars in which combatants no longer see their enemy face to face. In nearly two-thirds of the American states, the State Veterans Administration runs designated “horticultural therapy” programmes. Is Anna one more example of an apparent British innovator who is in fact copying America? “Certainly not,” she retorts. Her mother had a distinguished nursing career at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital and, when she fell terminally ill, Anna nursed her for the last three stressful years of her life. The garden had been a pride of her mother’s making and, in turn, Anna found that her own hours in it were a major therapeutic support during this prolonged family crisis. If it works for me, she thought, why should it not work for traumatised ex-soldiers, a group who pose increasing problems for doctors and mental health centres? America had already reached this conclusion, but Anna’s route to it was her own.

For a year she took a course in social and therapeutic horticulture at Coventry University. It rouses mixed feelings in my mind. It sounds like a course about what is in many of our lives anyway, and I cannot imagine what there is to learn which cannot be learned in an afternoon and a week of practical experience. If my overstressed Oxford classical pupils are going to have to pay 30 per cent of their outrageous newly imposed “fees” to support “access” to social horticulture, they will have my incitement to rebel. On the other hand, Anna came out with a certified awareness of the subject. With exemplary sound sense she never opted for the “alternative medicine” cop-out. She decided to find a garden near one of the centres run by the charity Combat Stress, which treats war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. When the Scottish Agricultural College obliged, she insisted that anecdotal results would not be enough.

Veteran-volunteers at the Royal Hospital site are assessed by qualified psychiatric nurses with Territorial Army experience. If they are sufficiently stable to benefit from garden-work, they are referred on to attend half-day sessions and establish their own pattern. Even the step of leaving a flat or house, travelling to an assignment and working with a group is a major departure for a stress-victim. Attendance remains entirely voluntary and most will attend only a few days a week. Groups of eight or so then work in a team with a horticultural therapist. “It is not therapy as you vaguely think of it,” Anna corrects me. “Quite often, after days of quiet work, one of our veterans will suddenly start to talk about incidents frozen and buried at the root of his trauma. It can be traumatic for the attendant therapist, too. We are not just talking about matrimonial battles or a stock market crash.” Her therapists in turn need to have support networks to hand.

A war veteran at Auchincruive, home of the Scottish Agricultural College

Horror stories among the runner beans are not within my daily competence. Can these traumatised people actually garden? “Look,” Anna replies with necessary realism, “it is not the garden which matters here. It is the patient.” In Ayrshire, the traumatised gardeners work partly in a vegetable patch, and whatever they produce they send to the kitchens of the nearby garden-restaurant. “I don’t care if we take no more than two lettuces,” Anna remarks. On the Glasgow site, the Gardening Leave group has found a role as a plant hospital for sick plants brought in by visitors to the new garden centre. The veterans work on the old garden centre site, the sick helping the sick.

Why gardening, you may be wondering? Why not music, or betting on cricket matches for notional sums? I like to think that the sense of a “therapeutic” afternoon among deadheads or uninvited bindweed is a human universal but Anna brings me up with a bump. “Gardening activates a sense of hope.” Indeed it does, as we wait to see what happens to annual antirrhinums or a well-spaced line of shallots. PTSD victims suffer from a sense of “foreshortened future”, as if there is nothing worth looking forward to. They also tend to “anhedonia”, the inability to experience pleasure in daily activities. Most of her patients are male, females being better at opening up privately. The men resist eye-to-eye contact and only relax when working side by side with fellow veterans at whom they do not need to look. Then, hoping for future lettuces from seed and enjoying the excitement of a new flower, they start to share what is wrong.

Anna’s level-headed command inspires awe and respect. She enlisted the professor of mental health policy at the University of Glasgow, Jacqueline Atkinson, to monitor her volunteer-workers and see if the charity actually works. Results are decidedly positive and are about to appear in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Health.

Ignorantly, I used not to believe in PTSD. I thought that veterans should get out into the fresh air and stop whingeing. So they should, I have learned – to be helped to re-engage. Meanwhile in my own studies of classical Greece and Rome there is a new mini-industry of diagnosing PTSD among the heroes and warriors of the ancient world. Stress-expert Jonathan Shay has made his name in America with his cult-book, Achilles In Vietnam, which credits Homer with an intuitive grasp of PTSD. Shay sees Achilles as the first attested sufferer. There was not even a copy of his remarkable book in Oxford until we bought one for our college library. I am less sure about Shay’s subsequent case, that Homer’s Odysseus is a classic sufferer too. At the end of The Odyssey he goes to find his elderly father who is gardening, unforgettably, in isolation in his family orchard. If Shay and Anna are right, Odysseus should have given up his tall stories and joined his father in the gardening which he really needed.

www.gardeningleave.org

www.britishlegion.org.uk

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