How do you feel today? with Vic
This week, I was a guest on the podcast How do you feel today? and had an excellent chat with the inspirational Gareth Dauncey about gardening for mental health, and a whole host of other topics close to my heart…
I first met Gareth a few years ago when I went to the amazing Do lectures – a three-day series of talks and workshops by “innovators, disrupters and change makers.” (Instagram followers may remember me raving about this at the time. It was such an inspiring event, I’d really recommend checking it out in the future…)
Gareth gave a brilliant talk, ‘See how you feel,’ about mental health. He talked about periods in his life when his own mental health was especially difficult, and how he started to note each day by colour according to how he was feeling. Looking back over his mood across weeks, months, and even years, he was able to establish a baseline and to notice patterns. Finding this such a useful way to check on his own wellbeing, he created an app, Mood, which allows everyone to do the same. You can watch the whole talk here: See how you feel.
We bonded over our shared conviction that gardening is incredibly beneficial for mental health – the immense joy and peace that comes from watching plants grow, spending time outside in fresh air, and getting your hands dirty in the soil. We’ve stayed in touch since, and I have especially enjoyed discovering Gareth’s podcast ‘How do you feel today?’ – a series of conversations between friends.
So it was pretty exciting to be invited onto the podcast myself! The episode was aired this week and I loved listening back to our wide-ranging conversation, which covered everything from gardening and the importance of community spaces for growing, to how I (try to!) balance work and daily life when living and working with Joe, my husband, all from our home, along with a lot of chat about the imminent arrival of some goats to our small-holding!
Do give it a listen to hear more about our business and how I first got into landscape architecture, our gardening and designing ethos, and our many plans for the 13 acres of land that we’re establishing as a smallholding / plant nursery / home to goats!
Listen here on Apple podcasts: How do you feel today? with Vic Wade
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You can read more detail about some of the things I talked about on the podcast here:
