According to "Allotment gardening 'can boost mental well-being', according to study" (2015), even as little as 30 minutes in a week spent on gardening, often on a small patch allocated to city dwellers, gives a range of physical and psychological benefits to the gardener.
Unlike the study showing that religion appears to make children less moral, the results here did not surprise me: there has been no such leading down garden paths with respect to popular beliefs about the benefits of some regular gardening or close contact with natural environments. I haven't gardened for years, but one of the things I always do when I visit my family for my Songkran escape from Bangkok is to walk around our family property to enjoy the plants, especially the wild plants that my father left untouched when he converted most of the land into economically productive fields. He also appreciated the calming beauty of wild things growing as they wanted, with bright native Australian flowers and berries adding dashes of colour to the greens. When I was growing up, my brothers, sisters and I used to love playing around in the virgin scrub hunting for edible berries, following tracks (often imaginary or made by ourselves), getting a glimpse of a fox, a spiny ant eater or a possum. Watching out for snakes was all part of the fun.
On the less wild side, my mother has always kept a house garden for fresh veggies. She doesn't really go in for flowers, but she does like to plant attractive trees around the house. I suspect that with eight kids, being able to escape to her garden for a bit of work among the carrots and lettuces was a very welcome relief, and one that she continued long after we had all grown up and left. Every time I visit, as we drive up to the house, she seems to be out with a trowel in her hand, digging, complaining about the ants attacking, or pulling off dead leaves. Except of course when she is at her club dining, gambling and fighting with her equally ancient mates of many decades, all beneficiaries of lots active gardening.
One small surprise was the new use of a word I learned, allotments. The article talks constantly about allotments, but it presumes readers know what they are. Although I could guess, I don't recall ever having heard the term used the way it is in the article. That might be because although I greatly prefer living in the city to the country, I didn't grow up in the city; also, all of my school mates in town lived in houses that hard large yards, most of which also had veggie gardens and often also flower gardens. Both sets of grandparents lived in town, but they had large gardens, so there was never any thought that they might get some small patch to garden somewhere else. Or perhaps Australia just doesn't have allotments of this type the way that the UK does.
Still on vocabulary, the excellent Oxford Dictionaries Online has an entry that explains the phrase from my title that I repeat in paragraph 3.
While I can happily continue to give haggis a miss, having tasted it at least once too often during my university days (thankfully at the end of very formal so highly drug fuelled meals), if I don't respond to Roger Scruton's piece of work tomorrow, we might come across some of his other work in a reading later this term.
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