Study On Gardening and Depression

Gardeners World magazine has published a survey that found 80 per cent of gardeners feel satisfied with their lives compared with 67 per cent of non-gardeners.

The media have translated this finding into 'gardening beats depression' headlines; Carol Klein appeared on BBC Breakfast and breathlessly (why are all female TV gardeners so short of breath?) showing us how to sow some seeds; and a professor of Essex University has responded with:

'there would be a large potential benefit to individuals, society and to the costs of the health service if all groups of people were to self-medicate more with what we at Essex call green exercise.'

Regular readers (!) of Garden65 will guess where I am going with this ... once again commentators are viewing the world from our society's current capitalistic and scientific standpoint. Why do they think you have to DO something outdoors to get any benefit?

Is it the 'gardening' that makes people happy or merely the 'being outside'? 

How do you define a gardener? I'm sure there are people who follow Carol's every instruction, and there are others who some how or other work up a sweat in their garden and consider themselves to have done some 'green exercise'. And then again there are gardener's like me (I'm sure I'm not alone here) who buy a £1 plant at a car boot sale, shove it in the ground with little skill, then spend a couple of hours sitting in the garden drinking coffee and reading a book. The activity level of my type of gardener is very low, yet I would 100% agree with the statement 'being in the garden makes me happy'.

It's the sky above your head and the wind in your hair that is the important factor, not what you are doing while out there.  The survey confirms this by finding 75% of fishermen (and women) are just as satisfied with their lives as gardeners. Surely fishing is one of the least strenuous hobbies of all? The really significant finding was that the important thing as far as 'happiness' is concerned is having any hobby. In fact half of the respondents said their favourite hobby is computing or gaming.

I would imagine it is doing something you find meaningful that is the key - not the jumping about.

Dear Monty was right when he said it's the earth that heals.

There Are No Cranesbills in Yorkshire

According to the charity Plantlife 10 species of wildflower have become extinct in Britain since the 1950s.

Land management changes since then are the cause. Industrial scale farming means there are fewer proper hedges and untouched field margins, and of course the increased use of herbicides plays a part. Since the war 97% of wild flower meadows have been lost, with a third of all plant species in Britain currently in danger of extinction.

Let’s repeat that statistic – a third of ALL plant species, not just the pretty flowers, but the ferns and mosses and lichens, grasses, shrubs and trees are ‘in danger of’ extinction.

And let’s face it, bar major changes in the economic, political or population spheres, that ‘in danger of’ means ‘will become’.

On the county scale the situation is stark. Middlesex has lost 76 species in the last 40 years, Warwickshire has lost 74 species since 1970. Even the subject of the last post, the wood cranesbill, has disappeared from Yorkshire.

Plantlife will publish a report next month. Not a light read I should think.

I’ve whacked up a little montage of the 10 lost plants.

Something that struck me while I did was that this impoverishment is not only in terms of biodiversity, but also language. In the last post I wondered how the cranesbill got its name. How did the Interrupted Brome or Summer Lady’s Tresses get theirs? Isn’t that interesting – it’s Summer Lady not Summer Ladies? Who was the summer lady?

It’s sad to think there will no longer be anything new in Britain in need of a name.



Information from Telegraph article

Image of Hawkweed from Kingsdowner blog , saxifrage from this Tumblr blog, other images from newspapers and wiki.

The Cat And I Count Birds

Today was the last day to take part in the RSPB's 'Make Your Nature Count' survey. The idea is to spend an hour in your garden counting the number of birds that visit. Always up for an excuse to sit around for an hour I took a cup of coffee and my son's homemade chocolates and went to sit on the bench in the warm sunshine.

Pen poised over my bird identification sheet I waited patiently. Then who should come slinking into the garden? Yep, our old friend ‘That Cat’. Result: likelihood of any birds landing on the ground = zero. So while I consumed caffeine and sugar and ‘That Cat’ cavorted about with a wicked smile on her lips all sorts of birds twittered and sang very loudly in other people’s gardens.

After an hour the final count came to two swifts overhead (you are allowed to count them because they are unlikely to land), two magpies (who strictly speaking landed on my roof, but that’s near enough I thought), and a couple of tiny little blue tits. The last two danced about the Amelanchier for only a short while. I worry about them. They must be fledglings that haven’t learnt to be wary of humans and are unaware of the existence of cats. I hope they survive until next year. Poor innocents.

Uploading the feeble results was an easy process. The RSPB also wanted to know about mammals that occasionally visit your garden. Badgers ... hedgehogs ... muntjac deer? Err, no. Grey squirrels? Oh, OK then.

One of the questions on the form was quite telling I thought. They want to know how near my garden is to farmland. Of course, this must impact on the animals that visit your garden. It would be the source of all those badgers. As you see in the above results page the greatest distance I could enter was 5km, when I estimate the reality is about 10km, assuming you class a field as farmland. I understand the scientific reason for this question, but does it also reveal the attitude of conservation groups to urban gardens? I get the feeling the people most likely to do surveys like this are people with an abundance of birds in big gardens on the edge of towns. But the majority of Britain’s population is urban, with a large area of land being covered with domestic gardens just like mine (and populated by naughty cats). As I’ve said in previous posts I don’t think the wildlife of towns and cities is taken seriously enough. Which is important because, let’s face it, that is where the wildlife of the future is going to live.

On the positive side of my hour’s sojourn I did notice the garden has a hell of a lot of flying insects in it. So there is an ecosystem there, it’s just that it’s an insect one. One of the discoveries was this little flying creature. There are quite a few buzzing around a pot of lilies. I think (and please put me right if I’m wrong) that these are ichneumon wasps, not flies. Apparently they parasitize other insects and are sometimes used as a biological control. If that is the case I’m not sure what is hiding in the lilies that they are executing their homicidal egg laying on. It might be the lily beetles.

And here to prove pessimism does sometimes turn out to be realism is the predicted occupant of the bee house.  A house spider.