Is your garden just another room or a real escape?

How to create an uplifting escape to enhance your wellbeing

The Outside Room

In 1969 John Brooke released his book ‘The Room Outside’ in which he argued that, just as a garden might be an important escape from a hectic world, it is fundamentally ‘a place for use by people.’ While I would emphatically agree with that and also happen to think that John Brookes was a genius, I wonder if now, more than 50 years on, when this once revolutionary idea of the garden as an outside room has become commonplace, some contemporary gardens have become more ‘rooms’ than ‘escapes’.

Making a New Low Maintenance Garden

We have considerably different weather than we did 50 years ago and the pandemic highlighted to many what a boon their garden was when we were all forced to socialise outside, leading to the realisation for many that their gardens really are lovely places to spend time in, whether that’s cooking, eating, playing, socialising, exercising or relaxing.

When new to making a garden the temptation may be to mimic your interior spaces, filling the garden with paving, artificial grass, heating, lighting and furniture as this approach is sold to us as the low maintenance solution - but is it really? Artificial grass may not need mowing but it does need to be cleaned to look good. And so it goes with many other artificial garden elements, which need cleaning, repairing & replacing. An established planting scheme on the other hand is maintained in a low cost, enjoyable manner which can benefit your wellbeing rather than being a stressful addition to your to do list.

How Gardens Differ from Our Interiors to benefit our Wellbeing

So why not focus on what makes your garden different and special from your interiors? Gardens engage our senses to uplift us in a way that an interior scheme can rarely match and the resulting benefits to our wellbeing are well documented. I particularly recommend a read of ‘The Well Gardened Mind’ by Sue Stuart Smith to really understand the extent to which this is true but if you would like a quicker introduction then please check out my 10 minute talk ‘5 ways to Increase Wellbeing Through Gardening.’

In interiors we pick a colour and arrangement for our rooms and usually stick with it for a few years. In gardens we can create a feast for the eyes, being more experimental with colour and form and having those change throughout the seasons. Inside we often have the TV or radio going but outside we can enjoy relaxing natural sounds; the rustling of the wind through leaves and grasses, the buzzing of the bees, birdsong, perhaps the gentle sound of running water. Inside we buy candles to introduce scent. Outside we can grow the base ingredients for those scents and enjoy the flowers as well – lavender, rose, jasmin, to name but a few.  Inside we relax on a sofa, perhaps watching TV to wind down. Outside we can sit, surrounded by soothing views, sounds, scents and textures, perhaps running our fingers through long grasses or across soft velvety leaves. Finally, outside we can grow our own food or natural medicines. Even if time intensive vegetable gardening is not your thing, creating a perennial herb garden can introduce growing your own in a small low maintenance area.

A small space by a back door with herbs and flowers for cutting and scent, a veg planter and a little sitting area within it all

This small run of planters on a family roof terrace incorporates herbs and lavender for scent, colour, and grasses for running little fingers through

Gardens also have the scope to introduce features that we don’t normally see internally, such as water features. These can reflect the sky to add another layer of natural beauty as we watch the clouds pass in the reflections or add gentle sound to relax us. Gardens also provide a means to take gentle exercise and a form of easy meditation. The ‘flow’ state brought about by the small repetitive tasks required to keep our gardens tip top also helps our minds unwind, which in turn helps our concentration and problem solving abilities.

CRGD Design for a family garden showing a water wall and rill

CRGD Design showing a small pond amongst lush planting

Nurturing our own wellbeing in our gardens benefits the world around us

The wonderful thing is, by nurturing our own wellbeing in our gardens through the use of varied naturalistic planting and the avoidance of extensive hard surfacing and concrete we are benefiting the wider natural world around us by increasing biodiversity through the provision of food for insects and small mammals,  avoiding water run off into our overloaded sewer systems and both absorbing and locking up carbon by planting and by caring for the soil.

If you would like to work with a Garden Designer who focuses on bringing joy to the everyday through carefully curated escapes infused with uplifting naturalistic planting, for the benefit of your wellbeing and of the natural world around you then please get in touch!