Gardening Leave has proudly appeared in the Dorset Gardens Trust Journal (Issue No. 02 January 2012). With the very kind permission of Editor Jenny Hedin you can see the article below. If you would like to know more about the Dorset Gardens Trust Journal please go to the website www.dorsetgardenstrust.co.uk thank you and enjoy the article.
By Anna Baker Cresswell
Gardening Leave, a charity started in 2007, uses Horticultural Therapy in walled gardens to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of serving and ex-service personnel. Horticultural Therapy can be defined as ‘The use of plants by a trained professional as a medium through which certain clinically defined goals can be met’ (THRIVE conference, 1999).
A Board of Trustees with Anna as the Chief Executive runs the charity. As yet it does not receive any statutory funding but a two year External Evaluation by the Mental Health Foundation is helping to build an evidence base and the results are due in early 2013.
Anyone who has been in a war zone will experience a degree of hyper-vigilance; living on their nerves, wondering where the next bullet or improvised explosive device (IED) will come from. The nature of modern warfare means, unlike the World Wars when the enemy could be identified by his uniform, the girl with a pushchair or the boy driving his donkey to market are just as likely to be the ‘enemy.’
Constantly living on their nerves in a heightened state of alertness with the ‘fight or flight response’ on a permanent green light means many service personnel find it difficult to relax and switch off when they get home to ‘normality.’ Many feel isolated from the civilian population by their military experience and this is often compounded by relationship difficulties and feeling ‘misunderstood.’
Although Horticultural Therapy had previously been used to benefit other client groups in the United Kingdom, until Gardening Leave it had not been used by the military; it is, however, widely used by the Veterans’ Administration in America and has been since Vietnam.
The Gardening Leave pilot project, based in the walled garden at the Scottish Agricultural College at Auchincruive in Ayrshire, took its first referrals from the nearby Combat Stress Treatment Centre at Hollybush House and is a safe, peaceful environment where veterans can join in the life cycle of the garden as much or as little as they choose. Walled gardens are peaceful places with no hidden corners which make them ideal locations for troubled minds.
All the vegetables grown at Auchincruive are used by the kitchen at Hollybush House which gives a much-needed purpose to the daily activity. The work Gardening Leave is doing is given added significance as they are restoring the only National Collection of poppies in Scotland, also located in the walled garden.
In the first three years of operation, over one hundred and fifty individual veterans received over two thousand half day sessions of Horticultural Therapy at Auchincruive and, in the autumn of 2010, Gardening Leave opened two more projects, at Erskine Hospital near Glasgow, and at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, in London.
Using the model developed at Auchincruive, all Gardening Leave projects are run by a Horticultural Therapist who, together with an Assistant Therapist, is supported by carefully selected volunteers whose main attributes are a friendly ear and a well-developed sense of humour.
At the new projects, veterans and serving personnel on the sick and injured list, via Personnel Recovery Units, are able to enjoy the company of other like-minded people in safe, peaceful surroundings. Their confidence and self-esteem improve and they can forget their feelings of isolation for a day. The projects are open exclusively to military personnel and a member of the Veterans’ Assessment Team prior to attendance, which can be for as long as they choose, assesses all referrals and self-referrals.
H.M. Armed Forces teach many and varied skills to their members and Gardening Leave is creating a partnership with the National Trust which will mean that ex-service personnel will learn vital skills such as stone masonry and joinery which they can then use to assist in the restoration and maintenance of the many National Trust properties in England and Wales. Gardening Leave with the National Trust for Scotland will pilot a similar initiative.
The restoration of walled gardens is a big part of the Gardening Leave ethos and the veterans who come to Gardening Leave have a vital role to play in this. At Auchincruive, an eighty-four metre long Victorian greenhouse, known as the Stovehouse, on account of the underground stoves which heated its back wall before the advent of cast iron heating pipes, is being restored to its former glory so the scope of therapeutic activity can be widened to include art and woodwork.
Over the next five years Gardening Leave plans to establish projects in walled gardens throughout the UK where there is a viable population of veterans - the Army Recovery Capability sites at Catterick, Colchester and Tidworth are also on the agenda and someone has recently sent an email Anna to say that the walled garden behind HMS Victory is currently unused… mmm… very tempting…!
