Bereaved Parents, Child loss, flowers, garden, garden photos, gardens, Life, Loss, Mental Health, Photography, Photos

How Gardening Eases Mental Health Struggles

Corrie's Mom

We all need something.

When we face an injury or illness, we hope the doctor will ease the pain or cure it. But, with mental health struggles, sometimes there is not a cure. There is only something to ease the pain.

We all need a healthy passion to illuminate our paths into the future. Maybe you paint. Perhaps you dance. Consider a moment where you get lost in numbers and formulas. Exercise eases others people’s depression, anxiety, side effects of PTSD, or others.

A purple hydrangea blooms in the Japanese Maple Garden, a shade garden.

Sometimes we’re a mixed bag of messes, but that does not mean we remain a mess. We are never the same people as before our experiences that shaped us. Instead we go into our tunnels of darkness, unaware of what to expect, and somehow we emerge with a flicker of light, which refuses to extinguish.

The gardens present me with different types of therapy for the pain with which I have struggled during the last decade of my life from multiple fights between students at my prior school to my daughter’s sudden death to my husband’s colon cancer. Beauty grows with the garden year-by-year, and you learn about beautiful insects and birds about which you’re never heard. This includes hummingbird moths, which are represented by the first insect in the video I posted earlier on my YouTube channel: @Corries_Mommae

The journey through grief has led me to grow more of our own food, learn about no dig gardening, drought-friendly, pollinator, and native plants; plus how to arrange farm fresh flowers as a small business in Flowers by Cocha. This is named for both of our children.

The design on the front of our business card.
These are some flower arrangements I did under Flowers by Cocha for some sweet moms for Mother’s Day.

The gardens have led me to make content from how to create no dig gardens to how to get your calla lilies to bloom year-after-year. It has opened up nature photography, flower arrangements, and pressed flowers. The gardens breathe new life into me in a way in which I think Corrie, our daughter, would feel proud.

Part of my signature for Flowers by Cocha is the mix of flowers and plants truly native to the farm, mixed with flowers John and I grow.
Blanket flowers, also known as Gaillardia, bloom in the Butterfly Garden.

John, my family, and I now have a total of 11 gardens on what used to be a Christmas Tree farm. They are all in honor of Corrie, and some individual gardens and plants are named after loved ones we have lost, such as the Barbara Ann Garden. It is named after John’s mother.

Martha’s Garden is named after my aunt, whom we lost in November 2020–the same year as Corrie.

The gardens do not cure all the pain John and I have faced from the loss of our daughter, miscarriage, and his colon cancer. They ease the pain. They offer us a different way of seeing our daughter grow up in the world through the natural beauty on the farm.

I cannot claim an ultimate cure, but I will say the beauty of the earth offers us a key.

The butterflies visit a Pugster Butterfly Bush in Arendelle.
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Published by Corrie's Mom

They say teacher turn over is high right now, and many teachers will leave the profession in five years or less. I will enter my seventh year as a full-time teacher, and my 12th year in education after I'd started as a sub and teacher assistant. I was the student in the 1990s you did not want in your classroom because I was diagnosed with ADHD and did not know how to socialize with other kids. I was due to be tested for autism, but this was considered an ostracizing experience for a child then, especially a girl. I am a third generation teacher and author of seventeen creative works.

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