People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can't put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well.
When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.
Absorbing a healthy amount of dirt builds your immune system.
Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.
I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil.
Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.
There is a direct correlation between gardening and mental health, not just to maintain good mental health but to repair it as well - that's anything in the gamut from depression to serious brain damage, schizophrenia or autism.
Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection - charm.
I use the period between Christmas and New Year to potter about, think and completely change my mindset. In that easy no-man's-land between Boxing Day and New Year, loins are girded and mettle readied. It is time, as we voyagers bid farewell to the old year, to fare forward.
Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.
If I'm honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.
I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.
As September rolls into October, I become obsessed with apples. Now obviously this is provoked by the ripening fruit clustering on the trees in our orchard, but it is as though all things pomological ripen in me, too.
What I love about French gardens is the combination of formal elegance and intellectual questioning.
Any British household with a scrap of land has always grown herbs for the kitchen. From the superb monastic herb gardens down to the humblest cottage, a supply of fresh herbs would have been considered essential.
A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.
That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.
Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.
Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don't begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you're branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you're branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.
Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.
