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When we sow a seed, we plant a narrative of future possibility,” Sue Stuart-Smith, a British psychiatrist and psychotherapist, writes in her new book, “The Well-Gardened Mind.” A surprise best-seller in the U.K., it came out in America earlier this summer. In recent years, the benefits of gardening to mental health have become widely acknowledged in Britain. Primary-care doctors increasingly give patients a “social prescription” to do something like volunteer at a local community garden, believing that such work can sometimes be as beneficial as talk therapy or antidepressants. Some hospitals have been redesigned to incorporate gardens, spurred by findings that patients recovering from catastrophic injuries can heal more quickly if they have access to outdoor spaces with plants.

Stuart-Smith’s book compares the uses of gardening in historical and contemporary mental-health treatments, and reports on empirical research into gardening’s effects on mood. (Laboratory rats whose cages contain soil and logs are more energetic and sociable than those whose cages include a wheel, a ladder, and a tunnel.) She draws on thirty years of clinical practice. Previously the lead psychotherapy clinician in the county of Hertfordshire, she now works for an affiliate of the British Medical Association which provides mental-health support to doctors. She is also informed by her own proximity to gardening on an unusually elevated plane: