Part 1: Gardens For Mental Wellbeing

Guest post by Sarah Gerhardt

Introduction

It is becoming increasingly clear how important gardens and gardening are to human wellbeing. When you engage with a garden, you feel the benefits right away and over time. Your body slows down, and your mind gets a break from the constant stimulation of modern life.

Gardens don’t just look nice; they actively influence how you feel. They can calm you, help you focus, and provide relief from mental noise.

In this series, I’ll explore how gardens can support wellbeing in practice. This first part focuses on mental wellbeing. It shows how you can design and experience a garden that creates calm and gentle engagement.

When I first started in horticulture, I was mainly interested in food production. I wanted to become an organic vegetable grower and couldn’t see the point of growing plants that were “just” ornamental. If you couldn’t eat it, what was it for?

Over time, that view shifted. Working for many years in a resident-run garden in Edinburgh’s New Town changed how I understood gardens. I saw how much people needed these spaces. Older residents would stop to smell a rose and visibly cheer up. Office workers would sit down for lunch and leave more settled. Children and dogs would use the lawn joyfully. Neighbours would meet and chat. 

You start to realise that a garden isn’t just a collection of plants. It’s a space that holds attention and offers a different pace. When you design a garden with this in mind, it can actively support your wellbeing.

Creating a sense of safety and enclosure

For a garden to feel restorative, you need to feel comfortable in it. This often starts with a feeling of enclosure.

It doesn’t mean shutting the world out completely. Instead, think of something that holds the space together and makes it feel contained. When a space feels defined, you can relax there more easily.

Hedges are one of the most effective ways to create this feeling. You can use them to divide your garden into smaller “rooms” or to frame a particular area. Even a relatively low hedge can establish a sense of structure and calm. Formally clipped hedges, such as box or yew, introduce clear lines and repetition, which many people find reassuring.

If your garden is overlooked, you can add height with pleached trees. These give you privacy without closing the space in too much. Species like beech or hornbeam work well, as they provide effective screening while still letting some light through.

Layering is helpful. If you combine pleached trees with a lower hedge and planting in front, you create depth and visual interest while maintaining enclosure. Your eye moves through the space, which makes even a small garden feel larger.

Within that structure, it helps to create a place where you can sit. A bench in a slightly sheltered corner, surrounded by planting, gives you somewhere to pause. These are often the spots people gravitate towards instinctively, especially when they need a moment of quiet.

You can reinforce this sense of calm through sensory detail. Pollinator-friendly planting brings movement and life into the space. The sound of bees, the sight of butterflies, and the subtle changes throughout the day all help direct your attention away from stress and back into the present moment.

Reducing Sensory Stressors

Designing Positive Sensory Input

Sound

Once you’ve reduced intrusive noise, you can start shaping what you do want to hear. A garden doesn’t have to be silent to feel calm. Often, it’s about focusing on more natural, pleasant sounds.

Water is one of the most effective elements for this. A small fountain, a rill, or even a simple bubbling container can mask background noise and introduce a steady, soothing rhythm. 

Planting can also play a surprising role. For instance, the leaves of birch, silver lime, and aspen create a high-pitched whispering sound. Chilean bamboo (Chusquea culeou), giant feather grass (Stipa gigantea), and Scots pine rustle in the wind. Dried autumn leaves of deciduous hedge plants create a similar effect.

Many plants with strap-shaped or large, stiff leaves make percussive sounds as they slap together in the wind. Examples include New Zealand flax and Cabbage palm (Cordyline australis). Some plants with seed heads in summer and autumn, like Turkish Sage (Phlomis russeliana) and Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), can produce gentle rattling sounds as the stems move in the wind, shaking the dry seeds inside. 

The placement of these plants matters. If you position them where they catch the wind, they will be much more effective. At the same time, you can create more sheltered seating areas where the noise diminishes.

What you’re doing, in effect, is tuning the garden. You’re not removing all sound; instead, you’re shaping it into something that supports calm.

Scent

Scent is one of the most powerful and personal aspects of a garden. It acts quickly and often subconsciously, influencing mood, memory, and even physical responses.

Scent is highly individual. What feels calming or pleasant to you might not affect someone else the same way. This makes it especially important to choose plants based on what you genuinely enjoy.

Think about where scent will have the most impact. Areas you pass through regularly, places where you sit, and spots that get warmth and sun are ideal. Heat intensifies scent, particularly in Mediterranean plants such as oregano and thyme.

To make the most of scent, try to extend it through the seasons. Winter-scented shrubs like Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ can provide fragrance in winter, while plants such as bee balm  (Monarda citriodora) delight with citrus notes in summer. In autumn, the katsura tree (Cercidiphyllum japonicum) offers warm, caramel-like scents.

Layering works here as well. Combine fragrant ground-covering plants like Breckland thyme (Thymus serpyllum) with scented climbers. Potted perennials can sit alongside wall shrubs, such as climbing roses, or larger shrubs and trees. Most plants will smell strongest during the day, but look out for those pollinated by nocturnal insects if you would like your garden to smell lovely in the evening and at night. For example, many honeysuckles attract night-flying insects.

Colour & Visual Interest

Colour has a direct impact on how you experience space. You can use it intentionally to shape the atmosphere of your garden.

Warm colours like reds, oranges, and yellows tend to feel energetic and stimulating. Cooler tones such as blues, purples, whites and greens are generally more calming. 

If you want a space to feel intimate, stronger colours can help draw it in. If you want it to feel more open, pale blues and greens will visually recede, creating a sense of depth.

You can also guide the eye through thoughtful colour combinations. Pair different shades of red for a sense of harmony. For instance, the deep red of Echinacea ‘Fantastic Red’ and red Cyclamen hederifolium blend well with the more pinkish red of Achillea millefolium ‘Cerise Queen’. Alternatively, plant opposites such as yellow red hot poker (Kniphofia sp) with purple red campion (Silene dioica) for a vibrant contrast.

For a harmonious cool colour scheme, you can combine different shades of purple. For example, pair Nepeta with thyme and Agapanthus. Dark purple or blue-purple plants, such as some salvias and irises, can be difficult to see on a background of green, especially in a shadier border. Combine them with white or light yellow plants to make them stand out better. Add in some pink plants such as Geranium × oxonianum ‘Wargrave Pink’ to create a transition between cool and warm colour schemes, or pair blues with some orange-flowering plants.

Green plays a special role. It’s the most constant colour in a garden and often the most calming. But “green” isn’t just one thing. There are lots of different shades of green, ranging from the deep greens of yew and holly to the yellow-greens of some euphorbias and the blue-greens of the foliage of plants such as globe thistle (Echinops bannaticus) and sea holly (Eryngium sp). When you combine different tones, shapes and textures, even a predominantly green space can feel rich and varied.

Shade planting is a good example of this. Plants such as ferns, Rodgersia, or Japanese aralia (Fatsia japonica) add structure and interest without relying on flowers. Adding white or pale tones can lift these areas, especially in the evening when light levels drop. 

Even if you don’t have an outdoor garden, many of these principles carry over into indoor spaces. Bringing plants into your home or workspace can improve concentration, reduce stress, and make the environment feel more alive.

Conclusion

There is growing evidence that humans have an innate affinity for nature and derive wellbeing from it, even though we don’t always realise it due to our fast-paced, attention-fragmented lifestyles. 

We immediately feel calmer and more at ease in a natural setting than in an artificial human-made one, and we are often able to concentrate better after a walk in nature. Gardening allows us to create a restorative, natural environment for ourselves. 

In my own work, I’ve often found that the simplest tasks, like weeding, create the conditions for ideas to surface and stress to settle. Being engaged in a garden seems to free up mental space in a way that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.

A garden doesn’t need to be large or elaborate to support mental wellbeing. What matters is how it feels to be in it, and how it allows you to slow down and engage with something outside of daily pressures.

Beyond how a garden looks and feels, the act of working and socialising in it plays an equally important role in mental wellbeing. This is something I’ll return to later in the series.

About the author: Sarah Gerhardt is a gardener, linguist and punk musician based in Edinburgh. She was head gardener at the Dean Gardens, Edinburgh for 9 years and runs her own gardening business Gerhardt’s Garden Service. Find out more via her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/gerhardtsgardenservice