A young man, reduced to a 38-kilogram bag of bones, shows up at his fiancée's door three years after taking part in the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. Fanny can hardly recognize him, under a threadbare raincoat and with a fez Turk covering his head, of which he has lost every last hair. A prisoner of the Ottoman Army, three years of labor camps have reduced him to a state of irretrievable malnutrition. British doctors gave him a few months to live. The love of plants and the daily devotion to his little garden restored his strength as a man; they helped him cloister a tragic past in a corner of his mind and throw away the key. Ted May came to live for more than 70 years."He devoted much of his leisure time to cultivating his extensive garden and acquired a certain fame in the region for some orchids of unique rarity," the local newspaper reported in its obituary.
Ted May was the grandfather of the English psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, who with his book
The Well Landscaped Mind
(Editorial Debate) has triumphed around the world and has now reached Spain. The coronavirus pandemic had just occurred, and the beauty of a message that invited the reader to get their hands dirty with dirt, participate directly in the cycle of life and experience how time expands and the soul relaxes when surrounded by flowers and plants arrived just at the time that thousands of people needed it most. “During the pandemic, the outside world was in complete disarray. Everything had changed, we were surrounded by fear and hopeless. The activity had been canceled and yet nature went ahead with its own tasks. For the most part it was healthy and vibrant. Last spring, in this region, it was simply wonderful, and that offered comfort to many ”,Sue tells as she sips a cup of tea that she wraps around with both hands to warm herself, on a sunny but chilly morning. His grandfather's story is the clinical case that helps him introduce the idea of how therapeutic having a "well-landscaped mind" can be. And its impact works to focus the purpose of the book from the beginning, but it wasn't necessary. Because, in reality, they are the life, history, family, the home of the psychiatrist ... the palpable demonstration of her inner convictions.they are life, history, family, the psychiatrist's home ... the palpable demonstration of her inner convictions.they are life, history, family, the psychiatrist's home ... the palpable demonstration of her inner convictions.
Sue Stuart-Smith, at her farm.
Next to her her dog Rabbit and behind her husband, the landscaper Tom Stuart-Smith.Manuel Vazquez / EPS
It's been more than 35 years since Sue and her husband, Tom Stuart-Smith, a sought-after landscape and garden designer, decided to build their future at
The Barn
, a beautiful 17th century farmhouse of oak beams and rails. , limestone and flat clay tiles devoured by moss.
The county of Hertfordshire is 35 kilometers north of London.
It is not the most beautiful countryside in England, far from it.
Surrounded by cereal fields and close to two large motorways, the wind that often hits the terrain and the noise of the traffic — intense on some days, non-existent when the fog turns it off — could have demoralized someone less dreamer.
But Tom, tall and lanky like an Englishman out of a BBC series, saw in the half-ruined barn his parents gave the couple the scenery of their childhood. The fields he had helped plant or the nearby forest where he went to collect firewood or hunt squirrels. With wild hair, his rubber boots and a small and nervous Jack Terrier dog that does not leave him for a minute, he plucks herbs, replants flowers and flutters in the conversation wanting to intervene, while Sue shows one by one the various Secluded from the paradise that both have built in more than three decades of marriage.
“Life is a process, and in that sense it is important to be connected to something that is always changing and growing. I am concerned about this very linear sense of existence that we have in the 21st century. Dominated by work, with objectives and deadlines. All under the claim of immediate gratification ”, she explains. “Gardening is an antidote to all that, because time is cyclical. The reward always comes after a wait. And there are also disappointments. But it has one enormous virtue: it always offers you another chance. The possibility of a new attempt. If something has not gone as planned, you can try again the following year ”.
It took Sue, Tom, family and workers from the nearby towns of Watford and Saint Albans over a year to start making the promising and demoralizing ruins habitable.
And at the same time that beams were reinforced or walls were insulated, the recent graduate in Zoology from the University of Cambridge and in Landscape Design from the University of Manchester began to experiment at the same time with the floral projections that accumulated in his head.
Sue Stuart Smith works in her garden Manuel Vazquez / EPS
The Patio Garden, attached to the sliding windows that overlook the kitchen of the house, is the prelude to everything that will come later. A brief interlude between the warmth inside and the wild nature, the Versailles hedges and the productive orchard that take over the agricultural complex. “Every garden is a transitional space, in which you feel the security of home, but leave the housework behind. It is a place in the middle. You are in contact with reality, but all kinds of daydreams begin to enter your mind ”, says Sue, to warn that the time has come to cross to the other side of the mirror. In the center, a rectangular pile of rusted iron panels, filled to the brim with water, reflects the surrounding tulips and euphorbia and the still bare branches of the oak trees scattered around the estate. During years,the panels lay piled high in a warehouse. It was part of the project that Tom had designed for the newspaper
Daily Telegraph,
which, like any self-respecting British institution, had to have its own display at the Chelsea Flower Festival, a key moment in London life.
I didn't know what to do with them, until a burst of inspiration made them what they were meant to be from their founding. "From the Dutch school, undoubtedly the best landscapers in the world, I learned the revolution that has changed everything in recent decades," passionately tells the landscaper while offering coffee, tea and cookies to visitors. “The traditional English gardens, or the French ones, were a projection of the interior order of the house, symmetrical and balanced. Until we discovered another type of beauty that consisted in allowing the native nature that surrounded us to gradually conquer the building until it became part of the landscape ”. A meticulously planned savagery in which everything grows freely, but nothing grows by chance. During the 1990s,the investors and bankers who amassed fortunes in the City of London necessarily aspired to be true English gentlemen and to own their country home. Accustomed to making decisions quickly and with money at their disposal, they hired Tom to design a landscape for them without giving too many directions. “This is going to cost you a million pounds… and they told me to go ahead!” He remembers with a laugh. He does not stop traveling all over the world. It also has clients in Spain, especially in Mallorca. And it helped beautify the cellars of a well-known Priorat firm.“This is going to cost you a million pounds… and they told me to go ahead!” He remembers with a laugh. He does not stop traveling all over the world. It also has clients in Spain, especially in Mallorca. And it helped beautify the cellars of a well-known Priorat firm.“This is going to cost you a million pounds… and they told me to go ahead!” He remembers with a laugh. He does not stop traveling all over the world. It also has clients in Spain, especially in Mallorca. And it helped beautify the cellars of a well-known Priorat firm.
El Patio de El Granero was originally conceived for an exhibition in Chelsea in 2015 and was later moved to its current location.Manuel Vazquez / EPS
He asked for compensation in kind, in the form of bottles of wine. But it was too coveted a soup, and the businessman preferred to pay in money. When he returns to
The Barn,
he dedicates himself body and soul to his personal project, which helps him to experiment with new ideas and crazy things. If Tom already knew what his destiny was from a young age, Sue allowed the inertia of a country life, in which he plunged fully after an urban childhood and a university period in Cambridge more focused on literature than on plants, him out catching inadvertently. Until she realized that there was a link that deserved to be explained between the long hours of work with the mental health of her patients in a London hospital and the peace she had found in Hertfordshire.
“When I visited the National Center for Medical Rehabilitation of the Ministry of Defense in Headley, the soldiers treated there described how, as they walked through the garden gate, their heart rate dropped, their mental state was different and they had the sensation of leaving bad experiences behind ”, he recounts the results of years of inquiry and curiosity that resulted in a balsam book. “A garden is always a protective space, where you can leave behind other concerns of your life. It is not an escape route, because you do not stop being in contact with life itself. Death also exists in a garden. You are simply in contact with the different realities that life offers you ”.
As you cross the West Garden, long corridors of padded lawns delimited by arbitrarily pruned yew hedges, a wooden bench that has been aged with careless elegance invites from a corner to take refuge with a good book. If one escapes through any of the openings to the left of the hedges, one enters another landscape of cherry trees, almond trees and wild flowers of hypnotic color. Sue doesn't know what each of the species is called, nor does she need to. But it controls every last of the aromatic herbs, the chard, the spinach or the asparagus of the garden that is attached to the house or the greenhouse that feeds the family throughout the year. “Urban gardens and orchards, open to the residents of the neighborhood, help people to open up to each other.They are real social bridges. Contact with trees and with nature stimulates empathy and generosity. It works even when you introduce plants into office spaces. Their presence, psychologists tell us, slightly changes our attitude towards others ”, he has discovered in years of collaboration and study in centers for minors, prisons or urban regeneration projects.
Landscaper Tom Stuart Smith, husband of Sue Stuart-Smith.Manuel Vazquez / EPS
When Sue and Tom arrived at the stable they were determined, like good Englishmen, to have their rose garden.
It continues to be called that,
The Rose Garden,
but there are other flowers that adorn it, more perennial and indigenous.
“The different layers that surround us are layers of time and reflect what our life has been.
We soon understood an inescapable reality: you only grow what your soil and your climate allow you to grow ”.
At one end of
The Barn,
the couple has begun to build an educational center, which they pay out of pocket and from small donations, for hospitals or schools to take patients and students to discover nature. Tom has divided the terrain into dozens of grids, to create a “library of plants”. Sand for desert vegetation to emerge, arid land to recreate Mediterranean spaces, fluffy humidity for English flowers. At the other end,
The Meadow
(The Prairie) is a gentle hill of tall, wild grass dotted with yellow daffodils, almost imperceptibly blurring the boundaries that separate the Stuart-Smith refuge from the surrounding agricultural crops. “Here you lose track of time, as a child loses it when he is playing. You enter a creative state of mind in which the hours become irrelevant and, in that sense, they lengthen. You learn to be patient, ”Sue says goodbye with another handful of advantages acquired after years of landscaping her mind.