Gardening, renewal and living gently with joint pain
Cultivation offers a form of hope that is physical, seasonal, and not entirely under human control. Stuart-Smith combines psychiatry, neuroscience, history, therapeutic gardens, and personal stories to explore how tending plants can support attention, agency, memory, and recovery. Joint pain may require adapted tools, raised beds, pacing, physiotherapy, or medical care; gardening is not a substitute for treatment. For women balancing change and responsibility, the book makes wellbeing tangible without turning nature into a cure-all. Sowing, pruning, waiting, and returning can create rhythm and future orientation, while even small contact with soil and growth reconnects care with possibility.
About Sue Stuart-Smith
Sue Stuart-Smith remembers hearing how gardening helped restore her grandfather after the First World War. Later, as a psychiatrist married to garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, she connected that family story with clinical experience, neuroscience, and her own garden.
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