Cork Views: In another few weeks the garden will be the 'balm to the soul' 

Once St Patrick’s Day has passed, it is time to get back into the garden.

Growing up in the suburbs in Dublin, I hadn’t much interest in gardening but I loved being in the garden. Especially lounging on a sunchair on a sunny afternoon with a good book - moving the chair down the garden as the shadows lengthened.

My father was always pottering in the garden. Building a greenhouse, taking cuttings from apple and pear and plum trees, mowing the lawn.

My mother preferred planting and over the years created a garden haven that still gives her so much joy. In Sonas: Celtic Thoughts On Happiness, a book I compiled and edited in 2009, I invited her to write a piece on what happiness meant to her and she wrote about her garden.

“When I go into my garden, it is a journey in time. For me, it represents a lifetime of activity, sometimes hard work and knowledge gained, and still accumulating.

“When I sit in the garden in the dappled shade as the sun is setting, it is so peaceful and calm. I think of that line in Yeats’ lovely poem, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven: ‘Of night and light and the half-light.’

Years later, when I bought my first home, it was the garden that attracted me more than the house. A third of an acre of trees and plants and flowers - completely overgrown but yielding so much promise.

In the early years after we bought the house, many Sunday afternoons were spent under the shade of the apple tree having a long lunch surrounded by birdsong and bees. The garden yielded so many surprises - blazing azalea in spring, rhubarb that popped out of the ground in March, hosts of bluebells in early summer, a Japanese maple that burnished red in the autumn light, and a holly tree smothered in red berries for Christmas.

A magnificent Scots Pine lost one of its giant limbs across the neighbours’ front lawn one spring and the entire tree had to come down. I still miss the acorns on the ground and the pine-scented, oxygen-filled air it brought to the entire street

I flexed my muscles and got to work. Mowing, weeding, planting usually with one or two toddlers trailing behind me, it was backbreaking work but so rewarding. I grew catmint the neighbour’s cat would roll in every summer. I grew elephant sunflowers three summers ago that finally bloomed in late August when I was in Kerry and got decapitated by a storm before I returned to see them in all their glory.

One summer, I grew wildflowers in a bed in the middle of the garden, which were magnificent for an entire month before they shrivelled and scattered their brown heads through August and September.

I prefer the glory of a cottage garden with old favourites like campanula, delphiniums, poppies, rosemary, lavender, roses and a host of other timeless perennials that open their petals, exude their perfume, and bloom throughout the summer and early autumn.

Thoughts of Trump or Vance or the horrors of Gaza, Ukraine, war, poverty, homelessness and despair are banished as I toil.

Lots of people ask what’s my favourite spot. That’s easy. There is a corner of the terrace on the gable end that faces south. Sheltered from the wind and facing onto the wooded section of the garden, it is flooded in sunshine, sheltered from the wind and hidden away from everything. I sit in my Adirondack chair with a steaming coffee and read, close my eyes and bask in the warmth, the buzzing bees and the temporary escape from a world in chaos.

Gardening has a myriad of health benefits.

A busy day in the garden can be a great form of exercise. While digging and weeding, you perform functional movements that mimic whole body exercise. You perform squats and lunges while weeding. Filling a wheelbarrow full of compost and preparing the ground for large plants transplanted or divided works large muscle groups. Digging, raking, and mowing can be physically challenging.

Gardening can be as physically intense as a work-out in the gym. Starting afresh after a dormant season can leave almost every muscle in pain. Gardening is also good for balance, strength and flexibility as any gardener standing on one leg to reach a trailing rosebush or wandering wisteria will testify.

Growing and eating your own fruits and vegetables can have a positive impact on your diet. I have had some success and a lot of failures with vegetables. Broccoli that was savaged to the ground by nameless visitors. Carrots that didn’t grow. Pulpy potatoes, shrivelled peas.

Last summer, I kept it very simple. A sloping bed near the front gate faces east. Nothing seems very happy there. I filled it with burgeoning pots of lettuce, carrots and onions I had bought as small plants in the garden centre and allowed to thrive in the porch before planting in the ground. Unbelievably, they thrived. Planting them there was a master move. Every time I went in and out, I would observe their progress, never forgot to water them, pinch side shoots or pick a few leaves from lettuce plants before they went to seed.

Different vegetables have a variety of unique health benefits. Tomatoes are high in vitamin C and potassium as well as lycopene, an antioxidant that my reduce prostate cancer risk. Leafy salads and spinach are full of fibre promoting healthy gut bacteria, aids digestion, regulates blood sugar, and can reduce inflammation and bloating. Colourful vegetables like tomatoes, aubergines, carrots, and peppers also help to manage inflammation and protect against chronic diseases including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Gardening brings people together and strengthens social connections. In the next week or two, the old oak table that sits in the shed for the winter will be restated on the wooden deck and summer evenings in the dappled shade of the western sunlight will play host to impromptu dinners after work, family gatherings at the weekends, and spur-of-the-moment tea parties with cake and my favourite blue and white china on sunny Sunday afternoons. The garden will be balm to the soul and a major talking point for what’s working well and what is not.

Madie Rekabie summed up what the Togher Community Garden meant to her at the 10 year celebration of Cork Healthy Cities in City Hall last year.

“What I love is sitting at the end of the day and having the chats. We are all helping each other. We are talking and sharing and listening and supporting each other without even realising it.”

The end of a day in the garden will see me on a chair with a book, a blanket and a glass of wine as sunlight sparkles off watered plants until it begins to sink, the temperature drops, the indigo sky darkens and fills with stars.

The starlings will make a racket as they settle into the treetops, baby bats will circle for 20 minutes in the dusk, hovering up their dinner, until finally all is quiet as I pick up my blanket and head indoors.