
This is a story of gardens and how people can grow well in them.
Through a lifetime's experience of award-winning work in community gardens and in mental health care and training, Jan Cameron shows us how tending green spaces can bring tremendous benefits to mental health.
Using the garden's annual cycle, Cameron reveals how stages of the growing year can act as a powerful metaphor and even mirror healing mechanisms that can help in times of distress, anxiety, or depression. By exploring practices used in therapeutic and community garden settings we learn techniques that can be applied whatever your circumstances.
The Garden Cure is full of ideas and tools that will help support your own and others' physical and mental well-being, especially when life is challenging. How, in other words, gardening helps us all grow and thrive.
"Full of inspiration with ideas and suggestions we can all use to carry us through these challenging times." The Scotsman
"Combines expertise and wisdom about gardening and mental health ... an invaluable source of ideas and metaphors for anyone working in either field.... Offers stories of people for whom gardening proved lifesaving.... As doctors are exploring more options for social prescribing, this book provides good evidence to prescribe gardening." Dr Lesley Morrison MD, teacher at The University of Edinburgh Medical School.
"The book many community gardeners and anyone interested in gardening and good mental health have been waiting for ... moving, insightful... Packed with real life stories and insights from the author's decades of experience working in the field ... this book will be an invaluable read for anyone working alongside others in a garden setting." Social Farms and Gardens
"Jan Cameron has distilled more than forty years of experience of working with groups in gardens and outdoors into a book full of wisdom and very sound advice. ...[The book is] as useful and as accessible to those who have mental health problems themselves as it is to those who guide them." Reforesting Scotland Journal