Here at St Mary the Virgin Church in Lewisham, we've created a therapeutic garden
which has become an oasis of peace and healing and prayer for everyone who visits.
When I arrived here as vicar, seven years ago, this part of the churchyard was a quite unpleasant area.
It was used and misused by people with alcohol and drug problems.
It was a very unfriendly and unwelcoming space.
The project really began with making links with our nextdoor neighbour,
the Ladywell mental health unit, with the NHS.
And they wanted some of their patients to come and do some outdoor activity.
And what then evolved was a desire to do more and more, to the point where in 2016, we launched it.
We invited the local community, our local mayor, to come and launch our therapeutic garden.
The garden is for mainly people in recovery from poor mental health.
So it's a garden for wellbeing.
So, we open it every Tuesday.
They come for a couple of hours, but then we finish with tea, chats
and we do a bit of mindfulness just to round it all off.
Well, when volunteers come on a Tuesday, they all have very different abilities both physically
and in terms of how long they want to keep going.
And so we share our jobs according to people's interests and abilities.
They can be weeding, they can weed in company, or they can do a little patch on their own.
They can be watering.
I've been coming about two years, every Tuesday, after being mentally ill for 15 years.
I feel useful. I'm not useless. I like working outdoors. I was always outdoors with my dad as a kid.
When I look at what I've done and I think, 'Yeah, that's worth it'.
My responsibility here within the garden is vegetables.
And it was decided that we'd have the three different heights, for persons who cannot bend over
and also need to be able to reach at that sort of level, perhaps from a wheelchair.
So, we have potatoes, tomatoes, there's beans, cabbage, plenty of herbs.
There's a lot of food here. If any of the people who volunteer wish to take any of this, they are free to do so.
Any surplus, if there's any food left at the end of the day, we have a link with a foodbank for refugees.
Nothing is wasted.
I like to work with Mark. He's always got the jobs that make you tired and stuff,
you know, get stuck in and stuff like that, yeah. So, I feel refreshed. I feel happy.
They say it's good for the soul. It's good for the soul and it's like, it just makes me feel at home.
Gardening is really, really useful because it generates hormones like serotonin and dopamine
that help to keep people calm and they also reduce stress hormones, cortisol,
which makes people stressed out.
As you can imagine when you're ill, you do feel very powerless,
especially if you've been an in-patient in hospital, you're quite vulnerable.
So, if you can go out into a garden and make things grow, that helps you recover
your sense of yourself and helps to give you faith in your ability to make things happen again.
If you've had bad experiences which have been very shocking and quite life-threatening,
particularly if it's involved other people, for example, being attacked,
it can really help to take some gentle steps towards recovery by being in a safe environment,
without too much close contact with other people,
but with contact with plants, vegetables, in a beautiful environment.
It's a real statement of the openness of our church community
and many others across the wider community
to come together just to share this space and to create something beautiful.
I think now people know it's here and they love, they love coming in to be with God,
to be with their own thoughts and to find that moment of peace.
For us as Christians, it says something deeper about the love and the presence of God
which we see here day by day.