A wise woman (my mum) once said that to improve your mental health you should feed your senses every day.
‘Look at something beautiful, listen to something beautiful, smell something lovely, taste something delicious and touch something beautiful every day,’ she said.
It works. It takes your mind off the helter-skelter of worries and lifts not just your sights, but all your senses to the beauty of the world around you.
Notice too how the verbs are active not passive. You’re to ‘listen’ not ‘hear’, ‘look’ rather than ‘see’. This requires engagement.
Feeling in need of this recently, I headed for the Winter Garden at Sir Harold Hillier Gardens.
Opened in 1998, the Winter Garden features more than 800 different plants and covers four acres, making it one of the largest Winter Gardens in Europe.
Everything’s designed to lift your spirits at this time of year, through combinations of colour, texture and scent.
I visit annually, and so it was like being greeted by old friends. The first to greet me, before I could even see her, was Daphne Bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’. Tall, slender, festooned in pink star-shaped flowers that smell of sugar, she has always given me joy.
I thought it was too early, too dull, for her to be in flower, yet there she was in her full gloriousness. I inhaled her scent, and thought of my mother, who also loved her.
Next to greet me was Sarcococca confusa, a small, evergreen shrub with residual white flowers. If it were a person, it would hide in the kitchen at parties, it’s so modest. Yet its scent is breathtaking. If I could only have one plant in my garden it would be Sarcococca, for the sheer uplift that it gives at this time of year.
Another old friend – equally self-effacing – is Lonicera Spring Romance, the winter honeysuckle, a rambling shrub with small flowers that, yet again, have a scent that stops you in your tracks. It grew in my old, city, garden, and I miss it terribly. A family of thrushes regularly nested in my Lonicera, making it even more special.
And of course, there’s my near-namesake, witch hazel (Hamamelis molis), vibrant, yellow, highly-scented.
It wasn’t just my sense of smell that was being blessed, my eyes were doing well too. Vivid red dogwood stems were set against dark-leaved shrubs and green grasses. Carpets of aconites flowered under bare-stemmed trees. And the bark of trees came in every colour from silver to red, some of it intentionally peeling and dramatic.
After half an hour, I was beaming as I walked, listening to the birdsong, seeing the stunning winter colours, and revelling in the scents of the blooms.
That left my sense of taste and touch to be fed, so I bought a piece of homemade shortbread from the Gardens’ café, took it home and ate it with a cup of tea while stroking the cat. Honestly, this should be available on the NHS, but as it isn’t, I recommend it to you. I’m smiling just thinking about it.