Grow Your Own: The Movie

The good old British allotment is seriously back in fashion these days with many council waiting lists for allotments running in the hundreds. Consumers are turning their backs on heavily-suspect supermarket veggies in favour of growing at least some of their own, pesticide-free, seasonal produce. However, it is now becoming apparent that the benefits of having a garden or allotment go beyond just the reaping of the produce itself. A number of projects dotted across the country are making use of gardening in a new and innovative way: Assisting victims of torture to regain balance in their lives by using a unique form of horticultural therapy.

The first projects of this kind were set up by Jenny Grut, psychotherapist and co-author of the book The Healing Fields: Working with Psychotherapy and Nature to Rebuild Shattered Lives (Sonja Linden, Jenny Grut - 2002. Frances Lincoln Ltd, ISBN 0711220271) with the help of the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, has been responsible for setting up a scheme called the Natural Growth Project in a garden near Hampstead Heath in London, and two further London allotments at Ealing and Colindale. There are now similar allotment schemes for trauma and torture victims in Oxford, Coventry and Newcastle using the therapeutic qualities of gardening to assist healing from extreme traumatic and life-threatening events.

In 2001 Margrit Ruegg - a Swiss-born psychotherapist hugely influenced by Grutt - who has lived in Liverpool for 30 years, began a similar small project in Liverpool to help traumatised refugees and asylum seekers (many of whom are not allowed to work, and thus have no way to occupy their time) regain a foothold on their lives by providing them with allotments to cultivate whilst offering them on-site psychotherapy between digging, planting and weeding. The project thereby aims to help them come to terms with the horrors of their past and find some peace in their lives by working the land. Many of these people have been subjected to torture and find it hard to talk about their experience in formal settings. Outside, it is often easier and more natural for them to communicate and express their feelings about their traumatic past, thus setting them on the road to healing.

Ruegg - a family therapist before launching the project in 2001- began with just three plots, a greenhouse and a shed. Now the Liverpool-based Family Refugee Support Project boasts seven municipal allotment plots and serves 18 families from Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Burma, Congo, Iran, the Ivory Coast, Kosovo and Zimbabwe. To qualify, refugees must have suffered trauma or post-traumatic stress and be referred by health or education professionals.

The project offers psychotherapy to parents and children alongside working on the land at the allotment site. Each family is offered a piece of land, tools, horticultural and psychotherapeutic support, practical support, signposting to other services and individual, family and group support meetings at the Toxteth base.

This successful project is now the subject of a new film called "Grow Your Own" set on a Liverpool allotment, with a story devised by two local friends: Frank Cottrell Boyce (whose scripts for films such as Hilary and Jackie and Welcome to Sarajevo have made him one of Britain's leading screenwriters) and Carl Hunter, a documentary filmmaker.

Hunter, who has made some 30 documentaries for television, was approached by Margrit Ruegg to make a short fundraising film about the project, which he did. But Hunter found himself intrigued by the stories of the refugees and asylum seekers he met. He took the stories he heard to Channel 4, which gave him funds to direct three three-minute films, each about one person on the allotments. Eventually Boyce created a plot drawing directly on the true stories told to him by Hunter and the film was born.

The film is a comedy, which Boyce and Hunter seemed more accessible than a gritty, social-realist treatment. Perhaps this is why they have taken the license to use a Chinese man - played by Benedict Wong (Dirty Pretty Things) - in one of the main roles although there are currently no Chinese refugees on the Liverpool project.The comic treatment is also given to the film's website. Check it out at:

http://www.growyourownthemovie.co.uk/

In an interview about the project with Ruegg herself in British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph, she says that the key to the success of the project is the healthy outdoor environment which is ideal for clients who were imprisoned or interrogated in confined spaces:

"Culturally, a small consulting-room is not the best place for their therapy. The shed, which doubles as an consulting room and office, feels totally unthreatening."

Ruegg goes on to say:

"It's better to be under the sky and in fresh air, feeling the elements."

A sentiment with which we fellow gardeners will find it impossible but not to agree.