Garden therapy

I often think that the greatest therapy is right at our fingertips, in the practice of physical outdoor work. For many years my 'work' has either been a specifically urban type of indoor shift work in hospitality, or long hours writing essays or starting, progressing through, and finishing text for publication in front of a computer screen. I can't say I'd forgotten what the outdoors was like, because being from the countryside it is simply a part of who I am. When I go back to it it replinishes the soul. A project I've been working on this summer during the pandemic has been trying to transform a big overgrown orchard behind my Roscommon house. It's a very large area for one man and a spade, but I like it that way. I'll have something to do. Digging , cutting and slogging away among the old oaks, sycamore and crab apple is its own kind of fulfilment; the great therapy of physical toil