Grow a longer, healthier, happier life

Grow a longer, healthier, happier life

What is it about gardening that tends to lead to longer more fulfilled lives?

Yes it’s the passion and rewards of gardening, how the joy of doing and creating actually energizes the spirit but beyond that there are some wonderful healthy transformations that happen as you toil or smile outdoors. From how the sounds of nature rewire your brain, from the skin-absorbed bacteria in soil that boosts your mood, from how daylight helps you fight off inflammatory diseases, certain cancers and many mental health issues. Then there is natural aromatherapy and herbal harvests to be had.

Fiann O Nualláin, author and gold medal designer explores how the garden heals on many levels and how we can maximise its benefits for health and happiness. Follow this talk with a stroll through the wonderful herb gardens at Kilgraney.

Biography

Fiann Ó Nualláin is a long-time proponent of gardening for health and wellbeing. A horticultural therapist by profession and a community gardening advocate for over two decades. He is the author of several bestselling gardening and health books. A regular on TV3’s Ireland AM to chat about foods and herbs for physical wellbeing and illness management. Most gardeners will know him from Bloom and his RTE series with Dermot O Neill.

Fiann writes a weekly gardening column in the Examiner and blogs about natural cures and practical herbalism at theholisticgardener.com. His latest book By time is Everything Revealed is a collection of life strategies and mindful techniques to better cope with the vicissitudes of life and maintain mental wellness.

Kilgraney House and Herb Gardens

Consisting of a series of interconnecting herbal gardens there is a large kitchen garden, a tea walk, a medicinal herb courtyard, a medieval monastic herb garden and a garden of aromatic and fragrant herbs. The  enclosed kitchen garden consists of gravel paths and eleven raised timber beds of varying sizes grouped to form a modern rectangular ‘’potager’’. Next to the kitchen garden is the tea walk, a short gravel path lined on one side with plants suitable for infusions and herbal teas.

The medicinal garden, set in a granite courtyard, consists of nine raised beds in Irish oak timber. In a lower courtyard is an aromatic garden planted with herbs for fragrance and also for their usefulness in cosmetic preparations. In an adjoining courtyard there is a modern interpretation of a medieval monastic herb garden with four oak raised beds surrounded on two sides by an oak timber cloister. A circular cosmic garden helps to explain and facilitate our understanding of the ancient belief that there is a connection between people, plants, planets and constellations.