There’s a persistent claim in the wellness world that gardens are good for your health. You’ll see it on Instagram infographics and in Sunday supplement features — usually accompanied by a suggestion that soil bacteria work as antidepressants or that twenty minutes of gardening cures anxiety.
The reality is more interesting, more nuanced, and — when you look at the actual research — more convincing than the oversimplified version.
Here’s what we know, what we don’t, and what it means for how you think about your outdoor space.
The Hospital Window That Changed Everything
In 1984, environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich published a study in Science that became one of the most cited papers in his field. He examined records from a Pennsylvania hospital where identical rooms on opposite sides of a corridor looked out onto either a small group of trees or a brown brick wall. Patients recovering from the same surgery were matched by age, sex, weight, and other factors — 23 pairs in total.
The patients with the tree view used significantly fewer strong painkillers during recovery and received far fewer negative notes from nurses. They also went home slightly sooner — roughly three-quarters of a day earlier on average.
It was a small study, and Ulrich himself cautioned against overinterpreting it. But the core finding — that views of natural elements measurably affect stress and recovery — has been supported by decades of subsequent research, including a larger study with 160 heart surgery patients that found similar patterns with nature photographs versus abstract art.
The practical takeaway is straightforward: a garden that’s visible from your kitchen window, your living room, or your home office is doing something. It’s not decoration. The view itself has value. It’s something we think about deliberately at Montrose — where you’ll see the garden from matters as much as what’s in it.
Why Your Brain Responds to Gardens
Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan spent over twenty years at the University of Michigan studying why natural environments feel restorative. Their theory — Attention Restoration Theory — argues that modern life constantly demands focused, effortful concentration: screens, traffic, decisions, deadlines. This directed attention is finite. It fatigues.
Natural environments offer what the Kaplans called “soft fascination” — gentle, undemanding stimulation like rustling leaves, moving water, or changing light. These engage your attention without taxing it, giving your overworked directed attention time to recover.
The evidence for this has held up well. A widely cited 2008 study found nature walks improved working memory performance significantly more than equivalent urban walks. Multiple meta-analyses since then — including one in 2025 reviewing 80 studies — confirm that working memory and attentional control show the most consistent benefits from nature exposure.
What’s relevant for garden design is that the Kaplans identified four qualities of restorative environments: a sense of being away from routine, gentle fascination, enough scope to feel immersive, and compatibility with what you actually want to do. A well-designed garden can deliver all four of these within metres of your back door — and in our experience across Surrey, the gardens clients describe as “their favourite room” almost always have these qualities, whether the owners could name them or not.
The Stress Evidence Is Strong
The largest physiological study on nature and stress involved 280 participants across 24 forest sites in Japan. Those in natural settings showed 12.4% lower cortisol levels, lower pulse rates, and lower blood pressure compared to urban environments. A 2019 meta-analysis of 22 studies confirmed the pattern — in 20 of 22, cortisol was lower in natural settings.
Closer to home, a study of approximately 20,000 people in England found that spending 120 minutes or more per week in nature was associated with significantly better self-reported health and wellbeing. Below that threshold, no significant benefit was measured. The 120 minutes could be split any way — one long session or several short ones.
Separate research found that even 20–30 minutes of nature experience produced a measurable 21% drop in cortisol beyond normal daily decline. That’s roughly the length of a morning coffee in the garden.
What About Soil and Immunity?
You may have seen claims that gardening makes you happy because of bacteria in soil. The research behind this is genuinely fascinating — a soil bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae has been shown to activate serotonin pathways and reduce anxiety-like behaviour in mice. A Finnish study found that children whose daycare play areas included forest floor material showed changes in immune markers after just 28 days.
But honesty matters here. The mouse studies used purified, heat-killed bacteria injected at controlled doses — not casual soil contact. There are essentially no completed human trials testing whether gardening delivers these bacteria in meaningful quantities. The leap from “promising animal research” to “soil is nature’s Prozac” isn’t supported by the current evidence.
What is supported: gardening involves physical activity, outdoor light exposure, stress reduction, and time in nature — all of which have well-established health benefits in their own right. The soil microbiome research adds an intriguing additional layer, but it’s the broader picture that carries the weight.
The Light You’re Missing
Here’s a finding that surprises most people: even an overcast British sky delivers 2,000–5,000 lux of light. A well-lit office provides 300–500 lux. Clinical light therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder uses 10,000 lux — which is what you get by stepping outside on a reasonably bright day.
Researcher Kenneth Wright found that after just a weekend of camping with natural light exposure, participants’ circadian clocks shifted significantly — achieving 69% of the full reset measured after a week. His practical recommendation: anything that increases your daytime light exposure helps. A morning coffee in the garden counts.
In Surrey, where many of our clients commute to London offices and return after dark for much of the year, this matters more than people realise. A covered seating area, all-weather surfaces underfoot, and a sheltered spot that’s usable in light rain removes the single biggest obstacle to getting outdoors. We’ve built dozens of covered outdoor living spaces across Surrey for exactly this reason — not as a luxury feature, but as something that fundamentally changes how often people use their garden.
What This Means for Your Garden
None of this is an argument that gardens replace medical care. The correct framing is “wellness” — gardens may support wellbeing — not “medicine.”
But the weight of evidence, across decades and thousands of participants, consistently points in the same direction: spending time in well-designed green spaces reduces stress, supports mental clarity, and encourages the kind of outdoor time that most of us aren’t getting enough of.
The NHS clearly agrees. Their social prescribing programme — now backed by over 3,000 link workers — increasingly refers people to nature-based activities. The government’s Green Social Prescribing evaluation found significant mental health improvements across more than 8,500 participants, with a social return of £2.42 for every £1 invested.
Your private garden is the daily foundation this sits on. It’s what researchers would call the “doorstep dose” — the nature contact that happens without planning, without driving anywhere, without needing to book anything.
After 50 years of designing and maintaining gardens across Surrey, we’ve seen this play out in practice. The gardens our clients use most — the ones they describe as having changed how they live — aren’t necessarily the largest or most expensive. They’re the ones where someone thought carefully about sightlines from the house, created a comfortable place to sit in most weather, and gave the space enough planting to feel genuinely immersive. The research helps explain why those design decisions work. Experience tells us they do.
