A Healing Summer

Looking for a gift for a guy with cancer—or for yourself? Consider the You Got This Get Well Gift for Men from Just Don’t Send Flowers (justdontsendflowers.com), a site featuring gifts for people in treatment or recovering from cancer. This package contains a men’s duffle gym bag, a microfleece throw blanket, an acrylic drink tumbler (for hydration), Burt’s Bees lip balm, cushioned crew socks and a puzzle book. It comes in a decorative box packaged in cellophane, with a ribbon and a message tag ($74.99). The website also offers gifts for women, children and people recovering from specific cancers and treatments (such as chemo and radiation). You can also design your own gift collections.

Get Well Gift for Men from Just Don’t Send Flowers

“Every summer, when my rugosa rose creates a complexly intertwined blossom that steams with fragrance, I smell it for the billionth time,” writes Karen Hugg in Leaf Your Troubles Away: How to Destress and Grow Happiness through Plants (paperback, $19.95). The book will be published on July 15 but can be preordered now.

Leaf Your Troubles Away: How to Destress and Grow Happiness through Plants

“This is why I go on. How I cope. How, in years past, I’ve survived the stresses of a fast-paced tech job and my husband’s stage four cancer treatment (which, thankfully, he survived).... And today, as I deal with the aftereffects of the pandemic and my sister’s cancer diagnosis, plants offer me silent, steady hope for renewal,” Hugg reflects.

A certified ornamental horticulturist, Hugg fills the pages with delightful anecdotes, insights from psychology and medicine, practical tips and fun exercises designed to share the healing power of even small moments in nature. She outlines her seven destressing strategies for “green leisure,” her method for “dialing into nature’s healing benefits.” She describes the many benefits of Japanese “forest bathing” (shinrin-yoku), the ancient Buddhist practice of walking very slowly through a forest to mindfully take in its sights, sounds and aromas. Not up for a long walk? Consider a dwarf hinoki cypress bonsai to bring the forest indoors.

When Garrison Wollam, a leukemia survivor , was going through the toughest parts of treatment, he’d say to his wife, “Cancer is dumb.” She’d reply, “So dumb.” Wollam is a third-grade teacher, and since he couldn’t exactly wear one of those popular T-shirts that say “F--- Cancer” in front of schoolchildren, he started Cancer is Dumb (cancerisdumb91.com) to serve others in the same situation. The site sells T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers and more featuring this and other slogans. Shown: Champion Women’s Heritage Cropped T-Shirt ($31.08), So Dumb Tie-Dye Tee, Cyclone (unisex, $39.33) and Athletic Joggers (unisex, all-over print, $37.32). Cancer is Dumb donates 20% of proceeds to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “It’s my favorite charity,” says Wollam. “I had pediatric cancer, so they have become very important to me.”