One Time, One Meeting

Sue Stuart-Smith

Sue Stuart-Smith is an English psychiatrist and an avid gardener. Her many original insights derive, on the one hand, from her clinical practice, particularly her work with victims of trauma, and on the other, from her long experience in planting and tending her gardens. Grounded in those realities, she is not inclined toward lofty abstractions or metaphysical speculation. But in her book The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature, Stuart-Smith propounds an abstract, metaphysical concept, which she calls “garden time.” By this term she does not mean “a time for gardening.” Rather, she is speaking of a sense of time qualitatively different from the ordinary.

As Stuart-Smith explains, most of us conceive of time as linear. One event occurs, and then another. Time marches on. “Linear time,” she writes, is “like an arrow on a fixed trajectory.” It “doesn’t recognize our bodies’ need for cycles of rest and recovery, or that the land needs this too. When everything is about utilizing time for maximum output, we become preoccupied with not wasting time and feel we don’t have enough time. We end up trying to live by a clock that we are always trying to beat.”

Against this familiar and often corrosive sense of time, which 21^st-century technology has done much to augment, Stuart-Smith contrasts a perception of time often experienced by practicing gardeners, whether they be hobbyists or full-time horticulturists, experts or novices. As distinctive as it is nurturing, this sense of time has three primary components, each of which challenges conventional notions of duration and change.

To begin with, gardeners learn to perceive time as cyclical. Rather than a straight line or fixed trajectory, the progress of days from month to month and year to year comes to feel like a recurrent loop. “Cyclical time,” Stuart-Smith observes, “was the first way of understanding time and made sense for people living close to the earth.” Intimately linked to the four seasons and the natural rhythms of growth and decay, degeneration and replenishment, the garden “gives us a cyclical narrative.” This cyclical sense of time, she further notes, is “kinder to the psyche,” because it allows us to learn from our experience, to envision a future, and to try again the following year.

No less important, “garden time” feels slower than ordinary time. In an age of “fast food, speed dating, 1-click ordering, [and] same-day delivery,” garden time moves more deliberately and at a pace not determined by human invention. Rather than obey the clock, the gardener yields to the rhythms of the seasons, which move according to natural forces, irrespective of human desires, anxieties, and expectations. “The pace of life,” Stuart-Smith observes, “is the pace of plants; we are forced to slow down.” At the same time, the feelings of safety and familiarity that a well-developed garden can provide can “shift us to a more reflective state of mind.” Working in the garden, at a pace largely determined by the plants, vegetables, or flowers growing there, we permit ourselves to digest our experiences and our feelings as well as our food. Absent such reflection, life can begin to lack meaning. But when time for those things becomes available to us, we are able to “construct our own narrative.”

Third and perhaps most central, gardening heightens our awareness of the present moment. “Slow time,” Stuart-Smith is careful to point out, “does not mean doing things more slowly. People suffering from burnout and depression have slowed down considerably and not been restored. Slow time is entering into a living relationship with the present. . . . Slow looking and slow listening nourishes and revitalizes us.” By way of illustration, Stuart-Smith cites the example of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who periodically renewed himself by spending time at his tower on the lakeshore of Bollingen. There, in a dwelling without electricity, he wrote in the mornings and tended to his extensive vegetable garden in the afternoons. It was a way, he said, of gaining access to the “two-million-year-old-man that is in all of us.”

As might be gathered from the foregoing, the practice of gardening, as understood by Sue Stuart-Smith, and the related practice of horticultural therapy have much in common with the practice of meditation. Both entail a regular, disciplined activity, encourage a deceleration of daily life, and foster continuous awareness of the present moment. Cultivating a private or communal garden, gardeners partner with nature to produce food for a family or community and flowers to brighten everyday life. Cultivating our minds and hearts by means of daily meditation, we too harvest, over time, the no less life-giving qualities of concentration, equanimity, and compassionate understanding. Garden time, it might be said, is also meditative time. And, as Lama Willa Miller, an authorized teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, reminds us, meditation is the “agriculture of the soul.”

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Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well-Gardened Mind (Scribner, 2020), 240-241; 250.

Lama Willa Miller, “The Opposite of Grasping is Intimacy” Buddhadharma, Fall 2020, 66.