Boston Flora

Tag: Sue Stuart Smith

  • Tuesday, May 13, 3:00 pm Eastern – Gardening for Wellbeing, Online

    Join The Garden Museum online at 7 PM GMT (3 pm Eastern) on May 13 to mark Mental Health Awareness Week (12-18 May 2025) as we host a panel of speakers to explore a range of personal and professional experiences that demonstrate how gardening positively impacts us.

    To those of us who garden and spend time in green space, the positive effects on emotional and mental wellbeing are undeniably clear. Published research articles make clear links between gardening’s ability to support social relationships, moderate stress, reduce anxiety and depression, and improve cognitive function.

    Chaired by Victoria Valentine, speakers including psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, Co-Founder of The Glasshouse, Kali Hamerton-Stove, Specialist Horticultural Instructor at Bethlem Royal Hospital, Sergio Ruano Heredero, and food writer, cook and vegetable grower Kathy Slack will reflect on how gardening positively impacts us all.  Livestream booking: gardenmuseum.org/uk £10

  • Thursday, December 12, 2:00 pm Eastern – The Serge Hill Project

    The Serge Hill Project for Gardening, Creativity, and Health was set up in 2021 by the wife-and-husband team of Sue and Tom Stuart-Smith. Based in an old orchard in Hertfordshire, England, the project draws on Sue’s work as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and Tom’s horticultural expertise as an internationally renowned landscape architect.

    This Garden Conservancy online program on December 12 at 2 pm Eastern will explore how the idea for Serge Hill developed from an old orchard near their home into a not-for-profit initiative based on the understanding that working with nature can radically transform people’s health and well-being. They will explain how the programs and educational resources at Serge Hill are engaging those in the community who have the least opportunity to access the natural world.

    $5 for members of the Garden Conservancy
    $15 for General Admission

    A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/

  • Friday, March 3, 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm – Sue Stuart Smith: The Well-Gardened Mind

    Friday, March 3, 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm – Sue Stuart Smith: The Well-Gardened Mind

    Distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener Sue Stuart-Smith believes our minds and our gardens interact in ways that can sustain our innermost selves. Her beautifully written UK bestseller, The Well-Gardened Mind, offers inspiring perspectives on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. For Stuart-Smith, a garden is much more than a beloved physical space. It is a mental space where you can hear your thoughts immersed in the primal awareness not only of nature’s beauty, but the eternal cycle of the seasons. Informed by literature, neuroscience and her experiences as therapist and gardener, she celebrates the joys of gardening, but also the life-affirming benefits of tending plants-physical, psychological and metaphorical.

    Before practicing as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Sue Stuart-Smith received her degree in English literature at Cambridge. Over the past 30 years, she has worked with her husband, leading UK garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith, on their wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire.

    This Garden Conservancy lecture will take place on March 3 from 6 – 7 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. To register, visit https://www.gardenconservancy.org/education/2023-speaker-series. The Spring 2023 National Speaking Tour is in partnership with Perfect Earth Project