I’m writing this from the back step, mug of tea going cold beside me, looking out at something that took me a moment to even recognise. The beds I planted with such hope in April are somewhere under there. I can make out the tops of the germanium plants — just — above a solid sea of green that has, apparently, moved in while I wasn’t paying attention. Bindweed. Fat hen. A wall of something that arrived with the last week of rain and has made itself entirely at home.

I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t been myself for a while. These past few weeks have had a weight to them that I won’t dress up in better language than that: I’ve been sad. Not in a way that had an obvious reason, just sad in the low, slow way that makes even the things you love feel distant and slightly pointless. The allotment. The raised beds. The seeds I’d ordered in January and arranged into little envelopes with Cody’s help, his tongue pressed to the corner of each one as he sealed them. The whole project of it.

So the garden waited, and I didn’t come, and the weeds — as weeds will — did not wait at all.

I’m telling you this because the whole point of writing to you is honesty. This newsletter has never been about a pristine garden or a gardener who has things under control. It’s about what happens in the dirt, and sometimes what happens in the dirt is that you go missing for a few weeks and come back to find the bindweed has taken over.

The Weeds Were Already There
The strange thing about this particular morning — yesterday, as I write this — was that I went outside not with any great ambition. I didn’t feel well, not exactly. I just felt that I couldn’t be inside any longer. So I put on the gardening boots and I started at the edge of the nearest bed and I began to pull.

Bindweed is not satisfying to weed in the way that, say, groundsel is satisfying to weed. You pull groundsel and it comes clean, root and all, a small complete thing. Bindweed laughs at you. You pull one stem and you know perfectly well that three inches below the surface the root is still there, still white, still planning the next move. It’s a long game, bindweed. It has more patience than I do, most days.

But here is what I noticed, about twenty minutes in, kneeling in the mud with a pile of fat hen growing beside my knee: I had stopped thinking. Not in the way where you force yourself not to think — that never works, as anyone who’s lain awake at 3am knows. I mean I had just… gone somewhere else. Hands in the soil, eyes on the next weed, mind quietly absent from itself.

It turns out this is not just my imagination. Researchers at the University of Essex, working as part of a 2025 review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, found that Social and Therapeutic Horticulture — which is the slightly grand name for doing what I was doing in the mud — can meaningfully reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. A broader meta-analysis from King’s College London, published in 2024, reviewed forty separate studies and found consistent positive effects on mental well-being from gardening activities. Not gardening-as-aspirational-lifestyle. Just gardening. Hands in soil, attention on the task.

Psychology Today puts it plainly: the repetitive tasks of weeding and watering prevent us from focusing on our problems. The brain is occupied. The hands are occupied. The loop of thought that goes nowhere — the 3am loop, the grey-afternoon loop — doesn’t have anything to run on.

I weeded for an hour and a half. When I looked up, Olivia was at the kitchen window watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and the tea I’d brought out was completely cold, and there was a cleared patch — only about a metre square, but there it was — where you could see the soil again. Dark, wet, real.

It was not a cure. I want to be careful about that. I am still working through whatever this season has been. But that hour and a half was the first time in weeks that I had felt, however briefly, like something approximating myself.

What the Science Is Finding
I don’t usually reach for research in this newsletter. The garden teaches most of what needs teaching. But I’ve found some of what scientists are working out to be genuinely worth passing on — partly because it matches exactly what I experienced yesterday, and I’m always more interested when a thing I felt turns out to have been measurable by someone else.

The repetitive motions of weeding, watering, and pruning activate what’s called the parasympathetic nervous system — the part of you that slows everything down and allows the body to recover from stress. Cortisol levels — the hormone that tells your body it is under threat — have been shown to drop within fifteen to thirty minutes of gardening. Not after an hour of deliberate mindfulness practice, not after a run, not after an expensive app. Within fifteen minutes of doing something with your hands in soil.

There is also something in the soil itself. Mycobacterium vaccae, a naturally occurring bacteria found in garden soil, has been studied for its potential effect on serotonin production — the neurotransmitter that regulates mood. The researchers are still working out the exact mechanism. But there may be something literal in the old idea that getting your hands dirty is good for you.

And there is this, which I find the most quietly hopeful: the studies consistently find that even small interactions with gardening produce measurable effects. Not a full allotment, not an elaborate plot. A window box. A potted herb on a kitchen sill. The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health puts it simply: being outdoors and tending to plants fosters mindfulness and a sense of accomplishment. The scale doesn’t seem to matter as much as the act.

I think about this in terms of the square metre I cleared yesterday. It is, by any objective measure, a small dent in a large problem. But it exists now, that cleared square. I made it. And my brain, it seems, registered that as something worth feeling slightly better about.

The Thing About Weeds and Being Low
I’ve been thinking — as I always think, in this slow way — about what the weeds actually mean, as opposed to what they are.

Here is what I come to: weeds move in when the gardener is absent. That is what they do. They are not malicious. They are not a judgement. They are the natural consequence of a space being temporarily ungoverned. You go away, for whatever reason — illness, sadness, work, life moving in and occupying all the available light — and the space fills. This is simply what spaces do. They do not hold empty in honour of your eventual return.

The error — the one I nearly made — is to look at what has filled the space and conclude that you should not have come back. That the weeds are too many. That the thing is too far gone. That the better option is to stand on the back step a little longer, looking at the mess, and go inside.

Cody asked me, at tea last night, why I’d been wearing my muddy boots again. I told him I’d been fighting the weeds. He asked if the weeds were winning. I said they’d been winning for a while, but I’d made a start. He seemed satisfied with this answer. Children often are, with honest ones.

The starting is the thing. Not the finishing. Not the plan for how it will look in three weeks. Just the square metre. Just the first hour. Just going outside and putting your hands in the soil and not, for a short while, being anywhere else.

Practical Notes for Getting Back In
If you’ve been away from the garden — for any reason — here is what I’ve found useful this week, offered without any sense that you need to do any of it.

Start at the edges, not the middle. The middle is where the chaos is most concentrated. Choose one border, one bed, one container. Make that the whole project for the day.
The Lesson: When you’re finding your way back to something, the entry point matters. Don’t start at the worst of it.

Bring something warm to drink. Leave it somewhere you’ll be able to see when you straighten up. The cold tea is a clock; it tells you how long you’ve been gone.
The Lesson: Being absorbed is not the same as being lost. The cold tea is proof that the time went somewhere useful.

Don’t pull bindweed with ambition. You won’t get the root. Clear what you can clear; remove the visible stems and foliage; return in ten days and begin again. This is how bindweed is managed, not defeated.
The Lesson: Some things don’t resolve. They are managed. There is no shame in the returning.

If weeding feels like too much, deadhead something. It takes ten minutes and makes an immediate visible difference. The brain notices and rewards small acts of care.
The Lesson: Progress does not have to be large to be real.

Three Things to Take With You

The Absence Is Not the Verdict.
The weeds that grew while you were gone are not evidence that you failed. They are evidence that you were elsewhere, doing something necessary — even if that something was simply surviving a difficult season. The garden does not judge the gap. It only waits for the return.

The Hands Know Before the Head Does.
You will not always feel ready to go back out. You will rarely feel ready. The hands go first; the head follows later. Science is catching up with what gardeners have always sensed: something in the act of working soil — the repetition, the smell of it, perhaps even the bacteria in it — does something to the nervous system that no amount of thinking about gardening can do.

One Square Metre Is Enough.
The whole garden does not need clearing today. It may not need clearing this week, or this month. But one square metre, cleared with attention and care, is a real thing in the world. The soil beneath is still there. It has been there all along, waiting patiently under the surface, ready to receive whatever you plant next. The season turns. The light returns. There is always, even after the longest absence, somewhere to begin.

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Did you know that just 30 minutes of gardening has been shown to significantly lower cortisol levels? Whether you're pulling weeds or pruning roses, the act of nurturing a plant provides a unique form of "biophilia"—our innate biological connection to nature that reduces anxiety and boosts serotonin.

As you head outside this week, remember: you aren't just growing a garden; your garden is growing you.

Until next time Embrace Gardening 🌱