Time with hands in the soil is an absolute tonic

When burn-out threatened NHS physiotherapist Holly Slimming, it was the creation of a flower farm on her family’s smallholding in Cheshire that helped her get back on track. This is her story.

I’m Holly – an NHS physiotherapist and part-time flower farmer in Crowton, Cheshire. I have worked in the NHS since 2015, a bright-eyed 20-something hoping as many of us do to make a difference. At that stage of my life I was not in any way ‘green-fingered’. I was exposed to growing veg when I met my (now) husband and then, when we got married in 2019, we grew flowers in pots to have around the garden and cut flowers to put in jam jars for tables – easy flowers like cosmos and calendula.

Fast forward a year and we all found ourselves in the middle of COVID. As an NHS worker I was so proud to be looking after the poorliest of patients in intensive care and as a team we worked amazingly together, rallying around each other and other ‘frontline’ workers. As the world opened up again and started to get back to ‘normal’ I saw colleagues suffering from what was to me, a relatively new term – burnout – everyone was exhausted. I, however, felt I had come through the experience relatively unscathed. The next couple of years proved to me to be more difficult than the pandemic itself (ridiculous I know but this is all relative). I went from being a positive, kind, compassionate person to being irritable, snappy, defensive and inwardly very negative. It took a while but with the help of colleagues I was able to see that I truly was not myself. I was off work for a month and I wish I could say that this was the end of my mental health struggles, it was in fact the start of a long journey of self-discovery and awareness of ‘triggers’, noticing the subtle changes in my own behaviour that mean I need to take a step back and rest.

And so, to flower farming! I cannot tell you why this happened, but I woke up one morning during the period I was off work, sitting in bed having a lazy morning and I had a light bulb moment – what if I tried growing some cut flowers? My sister and I were incredibly lucky growing up on a small holding. What if I asked mum and dad if I could lay some flower beds, throw some seeds in, and see what happened? I went for a walk with mum in Delamere Forest and pitched her the idea – luckily she was all for it, and the first beds were laid in February 2023.

Now as I said earlier – I was not green fingered at all, but what I am, is curious. So I bought loads of books, trawled the internet, spoke to parents of friends, visited another local flower farm and very quickly joined ‘Flowers from the Farm’ – a trade association of UK flower growers with sustainability as a main focus.

When I first started I was at the farm once a week, on a Friday. After a day in the fresh air, working the soil, I was shattered! But a good shattered, the kind that means a really good night’s sleep is following. I have since dropped another day in my NHS job and so work at the farm on Thursdays and Fridays. The time at the farm has created a number of things for me, time with loved ones, time to create something beautiful (both in growing and in creating bouquets and arrangements), and time outdoors, in the elements, with hands in the soil – and that for me is an absolute tonic and a perfect example of the benefits of the great outdoors.

Visit Marsh Farm when it opens for the National Garden Scheme on Saturday 4th July and Sunday 23rd August. Click here for details

This article first appeared in the 2026 edition of The Little Yellow Book of Gardens and Health – you can read it here