The Joy of Gardening: The Value of Reconnecting With Nature

Gardens are fountains of sensual delight. Weeds and flowers live in harmony with yellow snails, spiders (one was pink), bees, and, going back billions of years, the occasional fossil. Colours, textures, aromas, and patterns fill the garden.

Weeding, a perennial chore and joy in spring, takes us down to earth—and dirt, sweat, and creativity. Some weeds I leave. They have rights, too. Anyway, dandelions are impossible to remove. They always return, with all their friends and relations. I have re-defined them as flowers.

Nature is around us everywhere. The birds and squirrels hunt for seeds in and under the bird feeder, and so does the occasional rabbit, since Covid. Once, there were four, one nonchalantly lying in the flower bed like Madame de Maintenon on the couch. A hawk has dropped by a few times and caught a redwing and a sparrow. The feeder attracts predators and prey. “Nature red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it, or “the survival of the fittest,” as Spencer and Darwin saw it.

Some therapists now recommend re-connecting with nature: Nature therapy. We need it. We are, after all, part of it. Walking in woods, hiking up hills, resting by water, listening to the ripples and the bird songs and, I recommend, gardening.

Some people don't like nature: pigeons, cockroaches, insects, and rats. This contributes to what experts call biophobia. Some, therefore, don’t like to go out, hence loneliness. Research indicates however that the more time people spend in nature, the greater their trust in others and the better their mental health.

Gardening is both creative and maddening: the roses might die off in our winters, the squirrels eat the tulips, and ate the eggs of the robins who nested above the outside porch light, the neighbor’s cat caught a mouse, and a dog gulped a baby sparrow that fell off its perch. It takes us out of ourselves, and it’s all happening in the tiny back yard of my apartment.

As the Surgeon General noted in his 2023 Advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” we need other people and community. Yet in the park near me, the solitary walkers ignore each other. Only the dog walkers and their dogs stop for a chat and a sniff.

There are glimmers of hope. The environmental movement, so energized by Greta Thunberg, the re-wilding movement around the world, the eco-tourism, the increasing awareness of the climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity, the protection of threatened species, and the many efforts at rewilding teenagers, to get them out of their rooms and off their social media for their physical and mental health and the planetary future.

The fight for nature, the environment, trees, the Amazon Forest, birds, clean water in the rivers (UK especially), and against plastic in the oceans and the bloodstream, air pollution, and against corporate pollution and political corruption, will be long. But it could begin in microcosm with gardening, and our own personal understandings, psychologies, and actions.

We nurture life and our selves in our gardens: good for the soul, the body, biodiversity, and the planet.