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It was a week before Christmas, a working day much like any other for Ian, a 40-year-old landscape gardener with his own business. He had been seeing clients and was just leaving his last appointment to head home when he felt something like an electric shock in the left side of his face. Feeling distinctly unwell, he pulled into a garage, wound down the window and tried to call for help. “But the words wouldn’t come out; I was tongue-tied. I opened the door to get out and fell flat on my back. I could see people looking at me warily. They thought I was drunk, probably, it being Christmas party time. Luckily, there was a doctor filling up his car who came over and told me, ‘I think you’ve had a stroke.’ I remember thinking, ‘That can’t be right; I’m too young.’” That evening, Ian was wheeled into an operating theatre for surgery to stem a brain haemorrhage and save his life. His brother, a funeral director, was his first visitor: “I told him he could put his tape measure away.”

We are talking in Ian’s sitting room, looking out through big picture windows to his garden, neat as a pin, with its teardrop of perfectly mown lawn, fish pond and greenhouse. It is ten years since the day that changed his life, but re-living the memory is causing him some distress. After three and a half months in hospital, he came home to his wife Jacqui and their two children, then aged nine and two; a broken man with weak, slurred speech, he could do virtually nothing for himself. “I burst into tears a lot,” he admits. “I couldn’t see a way I would ever be able to walk out into the garden, let alone look after it.” Jacqui did her best: “It upset him to see me struggling, trying to mow the lawn in stripes the way he liked it.”

For months, Ian was taken regularly to an occupational-therapy group, but he grew bored with the word games and the confined indoor space. One day, his therapist suggested gardening: a charity with a big communal garden nearby could offer him his own small plot and plenty of help and support to do as little or as much as he could manage. A week later, Ian hobbled into the Thrive garden project at Trunkwell in Berkshire, sat on a plastic chair beside a raised bed and stuck his trowel into rich dark soil for the first time in more than a year. “I was back in an environment I understood and had some expertise in,” he says now. “I walked further that day than I’d managed since the stroke and I felt very happy.”

Letter from the Editor

The global financial crisis means charities are struggling as never before to raise funds and meet a sudden surge in demand for their services

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BACKGROUND

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The charity is well named: plants thrive at Trunkwell and at its sister garden in Battersea Park, London, and so do those who tend them – the lame and the vulnerable, people recovering from heart attacks, strokes and road accidents, men and women with learning difficulties or mental illness, and older people with dementia. There is no magic bullet: confidence, both physical and mental, takes a while to build. “But no one puts pressure on you,” explains Ian. “Some people may not do any gardening at all at first, but being outside where things are growing, in the company of others, you feel part of something, less alone and sorry for yourself.” Ian’s enthusiasm for his own garden returned, he grew in strength and agility, “and I learnt a bit of humility; there’s always someone worse off than you”.

On a bright and breezy November morning, sheep are grazing the pasture around Thrive’s garden – the land was donated by the estate’s owner – and the handsome parkland trees are in full autumn fig. There is a walled kitchen garden, a glasshouse and polytunnels, allotments and a canteen in the old stable block. In the soft-fruit garden, a working party is hauling out diseased blackcurrant bushes supervised by Vicky, a paid staff member. Les and Dennis, who have both had strokes, are working on a recalcitrant root, rocking it back and forth between their spades; Dennis only has the use of one hand and, though his speech is badly affected, he manages to indicate that he’s sorry for not pulling his weight. “Don’t worry, mate,” says Les. “We’ll get her out between us.” Their perseverance is both admirable and agonising – you want to take the spade and do it for them, a temptation volunteers have to learn to resist. Eddie, who has Down’s syndrome, lays his head on Vicky’s shoulder, gazing up at her; Christopher, who has autism and doesn’t speak, is wheelbarrowing fresh soil from the compost – his favourite job; a tall girl is cantering up and down between the beds. It’s all amiably and gently chaotic, but the job is slowly getting done. A sign on the tool shed door reads, “More grows in the garden than was sown there.”

A pleasant contemporary building houses the head office; the charity advises garden projects all over the UK, visits hospitals and rehabilitation centres, and is working with the local authority to support elderly people in the maintenance of their own gardens with help from volunteers. Fretting about the garden going to pot is common as people age. “We can only accommodate a limited number at the two centres,” explains Harriet Evans, the project manager, “so a lot of our effort goes into outreach.”

The NHS has given initial funding for a new scheme, called Gardening for Hearts and Minds: “We take seeds, compost and pots into rehab centres and give each patient a guide book with very simple instructions because many of them will have cognitive impairment,” says Evans. “The physiotherapists love it because sowing seeds and potting up uses hand-eye co-ordination, focus and fine motor skills – all the things they are working on.” Motivation is often a problem for people recovering from heart disease or stroke; some fear bringing on another attack by straining themselves. But because patients want to check on the progress of seedlings, they will walk much further than they would otherwise, and will happily stand to do the watering. “We talk about how they can make gardening easier when they get home: perhaps changing from annuals to perennials, making beds narrower or higher, using specially adapted tools. Or gardening without a garden: using windowsills and porches. The idea is for people to manage their own rehabilitation.”

And miraculously, they do, such as Penny, who has multiple sclerosis and is registered blind, though she can just discern the bright yellow courgettes and purple peas she grows in her own garden: “When I’m gardening, I completely forget that I’m disabled,” she says. And Tim, whose horrific head injuries in a road accident robbed him of nearly everything: his sight, his memory and, eventually, his wife and children. Taking his first uncertain steps at Thrive brought him back from the brink; he is now a qualified horticulturist and works for the charity full-time, helping others as desperate and dependent as he once was.

It is warm in the big glasshouse and smells pleasantly of compost and basil and soap; several people are engaged in washing plant pots and the suds are flying. A tall man strides over: “Hello, I’m John.” He grins widely and goes back to his washing. Boxes of tiny seedlings lie in neat rows on the benches. Outside, there is a tessellation of raised beds, each one allocated to an individual and the subject of fierce rivalry in the run-up to the summer flower show; the only colour now is a yellow flare of ragged chrysanthemums. Donald, a small, bent fellow with no speech but a huge smile, tugs me along to show me his plot, then reaches up to kiss my cheek.

Eileen was one of the most enthusiastic of the plot-holders: diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 55, her horizons had shrunk to the four walls of her home as the world became increasingly bewildering. Her husband Alan cares for her. “Thrive was one of the best things that happened to Eileen,” he tells me. “At home, she would just sit, staring into space; when I picked her up from Thrive she would laugh, joke and hum a tune. It really brought her out; she made loads of friends and loved her plot – she called it the Muck.” A Thrive therapist told me: “We work on positive reminiscence, using anything – the smell of a herb, a washing line, a rummage box – to elicit recognition and a sense of connection to a life lived. A garden alerts the senses; sound, smell, taste and touch are all involved.”

Thrive also caters for children of between 14 and 16 years old, who for one reason or another find themselves out of step with their peers: labelled “special needs” or “behavioural difficulties”. In the calm confines of the Secret Garden, I meet Philip, diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, that catch-all for troublesome kids, encompassing everyone from fidgets to ungovernable tantrum throwers. “I don’t like school,” he tells me. “I got into a lot of trouble.” What sort of trouble? “Fighting, being annoying…” A teacher suggested Growing Options, a Thrive scheme that takes children like Philip for one day a week over two years with the aim of giving them a skill for a working life. Philip comes here every Wednesday, which breaks up the school week. “It makes me calmer,” he says. “I can manage two days of school in a row.” His parents are happier, too, he says. “Because they don’t have teachers ringing them up every day complaining about me.” He doesn’t have a garden at home, but goes regularly to help a cousin with his. “I like digging and weeding.” Does he want to do gardening as a job? His plump, wary face breaks into a shy grin: “Yep.”

In the race for funding and donations, certain charities hold the aces: abandoned dogs, trashed rainforests, heroic lifeboatmen; they all ring our bells. Stroke victims with lopsided faces, dementia patients with bewildered expressions, teenagers at odds with the world; not so much. And for all its celebrity gurus and TV makeovers, gardening is still, if not Sunday-suburban sad, not rock’n’roll either. But there is the saying, “If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden”, and that was the main thing that struck me at Thrive: everyone, including the extraordinarily patient volunteers and staff, looked happy. I’m not sure how the alchemy of gardening works, but if it makes Eileen hum and gives Ian his confidence back and stops Philip feeling like a loser and offers damaged people the feeling that life might be worth living, well then, that’s not nothing.

As I left that day, the boys in the Secret Garden were “planting” 2m hazel sticks which they’d painted in vivid oranges, purples and blues: cheerful little psychedelic forests, colour co-ordinated with the winter pansies.

www.thrive.org.uk