The Tired Gardener

Healing Through Growing

Healing Through Growing Blog



A Miniature Expedition

When the outside world is too big to face and you don't have the energy to re-connect with nature outside, a cheap microscope opens whole new avenues of connection and beauty to lift the soul.

  • Crocuses, hellebores and snowdrops: bee survival supplies in the late winter.

Spring in My Steps

Recovery is a frustrating business with lots of twists and turns. Today a bumblebee helped me to navigate a corner.

  • Mango
  • Mango stone
  • Avocado

Baby Steps Towards Recovery

Should I be resting or moving?  Learning how to take baby steps and manage frustration is a huge challenge in the early stages of recovery or after a relapse.  Sowing a few seeds is a manageable activity that gives a sense of achievement and anticipation.

  • Just one crazy shelf in my real library
  • Courtesy of University of Illinois Library, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
  • Trinity College Library, Dublin. Courtesy of Diliff, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Healing my Inner Library

OK, so this has nothing to do with the natural world and growing, it is all about the inner world and healing the damage that fibromyalgia et al do to your mind and mental capacities. Sometimes when you sit down to write surprising things happen.

  • The Path into the Woods
  • Wild Woods
  • Walking through a Clearing

Into the Woods

The recovery ‘journey’ may be a cliché, but there are few better ways of understanding the ups and downs, the twists and turns, involved in finding one’s way back to full health. The journey is a hard one, but sometimes the most difficult part is not looking too far ahead, learning to focus on the path under your feet and to find companions to share the highs and lows along the way.

A Corsage of Runner Beans

There's a difference between learning about recovery and understanding.  Sometimes it takes a set-back to help the penny drop and grasp what being guided by your body really means.

  • St Pankraz, courtesy of Holger Uwe Schmitt through Wikimedia Commons
  • Bubble wrap protection in mid-May

Cold May Gardeners

Gardening folklore is an endless source of fascination. Do you know who the Cold Gardeners are and why they matter in May?

  • Apple blossom

Resilience

In uncertain times a garden can be a source of food security as well as emotional well-being.

  • Snow in February, Leicestershire.
  • Snowdrops.
  • Late afternoon snow, Leicestershire.

Cold!

Being cold and exhausted is a common part of fibro/CFS/ME.  Don’t accept and learn to cope,  learn why you’re cold and how to deal with it.

  • A young male blackbird, sitting on my garden fork, looking for worms.
  • A grey loerie, affectionately known in South Africa as a 'go away bird'.
  • A hoopoe.

Feathered Friends

It's easy to become caught up in destructive moods and thoughts, brought on by past experiences, and to miss the calm and beauty around us now.  Birds have a wonderful way of catching my attention and bringing me out of these dark places into the beauty of the present moment.

  • Fruit buds on an apple tree.
  • First year apple trees, planted as 'whips'.
  • Beauty of Bath apple tree on dwarfing root-stock.  Pruned into a goblet shape.

A Pruning Meditation

Pruning on a cold January day can be an exercise in mindfulness and a breath of fresh air after the warmth and indulgence of the Christmas holiday.

  • Blackcurrants.
  • Sitting down to strip the fruit from the canes.
  • Part of my gooseberry harvest.

Super Fruit

Berries are extremely nutritious, tasty and easy to grow in small spaces, even for people with low energy levels.


My illness has meant that I have had to give up my work and so I am now looking to find a new career through my writing. If you have enjoyed this page and would like to encourage me to produce more, click the coffee cup below to make a small donation; no strings, no fuss, just a little, 'Thanks, keep it up.'


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