Happy new year and best wishes for 2025!
I do not always update this website as often as I should. Like many people, I find that time can often be in short supply.
Now, as the new year begins, I fully intend to share more of my designs, and more design tips and advice for home growing and a more sustainable way of life. But as we all know, resolving, or intending to do something is not the same as doing it!
Whether or not I manage to update this site as much as I intend, I know that I will spend plenty of time in my garden this year.
New Year’s Resolutions: Garden Inspiration
Observing the period of dormancy in a winter garden, we can see the importance of having some ‘down time’ and resolve to get more sleep.
Seeing up close the complex interactions within ecosystems, we can be inspired to improve our connections with family, friends, or others in our communities.
Observing how plants and animals aid one another in natural systems, we may be inspired to become more involved in community life where we live. We might determine to do more for others who are less fortunate than ourselves.
Watching busy bees or other wildlife toiling away may inspire us to work harder to achieve our goals, while the quiet stillness of a venerable tree might remind us to take some time to ourselves now and then, making time for rest and relaxation in our busy lives.
Looking at our gardens can inspire us in a range of different ways. They may inspire us to do more to make the most of them, or lead us down a range of tangents to improve our lives one small, slow solution at a time.
Of course, looking at our gardens can also encourage us to do more to help combat climate change and biodiversity loss where we live – something we should all be thinking about this year.
Keeping New Year’s Resolutions: How Gardens Help
Some of the most common new year’s resolutions revolve around getting more sleep, eating better, being healthier and getting more exercise. Even when our goals are not directly related to them, gardens and gardening can help us to keep a range of our resolutions.
If you have made a resolution to improve your sleep, for example, spending more time in your garden can help you to reset your circadian rhythms.
Being in green and natural environments also helps bust stress. Gardening can improve resilience – personal resilience, our ability to cope – as well as practical resilience and self-sufficiency, helping us to feel more capable, cool, calm and collected.
This not only helps us sleep better but also makes it more likely that we will be able to keep whatever resolutions we make.
Tip: Make sure your garden is designed to provide for recreational and relaxation space. The right design can provide these things along with fruits, vegetables, herbs and other tangible yields.
Gardens can improve our mental and physical health in many ways. Simply being in them can help, but beyond this, they can provide so much of what we need to remain healthy in body and mind.
Of course, we can grow food, organically, in a range of ways, and find ways to maximise the yields we can achieve in the space available to us.
Tip: Growing your own can provide far more than food alone. As well as growing fresh, organic produce, you can also potentially grow a range of medicinal herbs and spices, ingredients for natural cleaning and beauty products, and more. Start researching plants and you can explore their many uses.
Understanding the many different yields plants can provide is important for us all, especially for those who are determined to improve their gardens and truly make the most of their outside space in 2025.
If you want to get fit, lose weight, or improve your health in general, even before the spring there are plenty of garden jobs you might get on with instead of heading to the gym.
Tip: Lose weight and get fit preparing new garden beds – lugging branches for hugelkultur beds, for example, can be quite a work out. You can also do some digging – I recommend operating a no dig system for growing areas, but you might dig for a range of reasons – to make a new pond or root cellar, for example.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be keeping fit pruning some trees and shrubs in my mature garden, and prepping polytunnel beds for early spring planting – moving mulch around to where it is needed.
Remember, in a garden you are never the only one doing the work. Even where you are the only human gardener, there will be a host of helpers in the ecosystems around you. Working with nature can help you feel less alone, however hard keeping your resolutions may be.
The right design can ensure that your land, however much of it you have, is used to its full potential.
Designs will always continue to evolve and no matter how much work you put it, you will typically find there is always more you can do. But a design can help you to get your goals straight and have clear things to aim for as you move towards a better and more sustainable year ahead.
If you would like my help to bring a holistic plan together for your property, please do get in touch. I can create a tailored plan for your particular site and goals.