Psychiatrist Sue Stuart-Smith: The Beauty of Flowers Lights Up the Same Brain Circuits as Romantic Love

Sue Stuart-Smith first studied English literature at Cambridge, and only then medicine. Psychiatry, she says, brings her two passions together: patients' life stories and science. Today the British psychiatrist and psychotherapist is known for her book "The Well Gardened Mind", translated into 19 languages - a book about what a garden does to the mind.

She didn't discover gardening in a clinic, but at home. Her husband, the landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, created a garden from scratch on an old farm surrounded by wheat fields. She started modestly - with herbs and vegetables. And she noticed something she later turned into a professional position: hours among the flower beds melted away the stress that had built up.

Her explanation is physiological, not romantic. Contact with green environments, she says, slows the pulse, lowers blood pressure and levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and improves cognitive function. And beauty - say, a flower that has just opened - activates the brain's reward circuits, similar to the ones romantic love sets off.

There's also something a pill doesn't offer: a future. Gardening means planning - you plant today to see something next spring. For people with depression, anxiety or trauma, Stuart-Smith says, that very sense that there is a "next" is precious. She isn't suggesting throwing away medication when it's needed, but letting the garden complement it. In the UK there's even a name for it: "social prescribing", when a doctor recommends a community activity alongside the prescription.

The idea runs in her family too. Her grandfather was a prisoner of war in Turkey during the First World War and, according to her, recovered thanks to gardening. In that family story she also sees the roots of horticultural therapy.

Since June 2024, their garden has also operated as a community space. The Serge Hill Project hosts school visits and runs activities for people with cancer, homeless people, former prisoners and dementia patients. The author says she receives letters from readers all over the world and has offered support in Ukraine as well.

None of this will surprise anyone who grew up next to a grandmother who treated every worry with a hoe in the vegetable patch. The only new thing is that a psychiatrist is now confirming it with cortisol and blood pressure. How many of us have a yard, a balcony or a patch of land at our parents' place - and still think therapy is something you have to buy?