For a variety of reasons, my wife and I were alone in the house for most of the Christmas and New Year period. Well, just us, the dog, and the boy’s “house rabbit”, Wilfred. “Great!” we lied to ourselves. “The weather will be grand, we can catch up on the gardening, and drink margaritas on the deck as we survey our tidy yard.”
Bloody weather. It was probably rubbish because journalist Kevin Norquay, who saw 2024 out with an article about how bad weather follows him about, also stayed in Wellington.
My wife was particularly grumpy about the weather and how it curtailed the gardening. She really loves gardening.
She’s not alone. Google tells me gardening is “popular with many people, including millennials, older people and 80% of American households”. I particularly enjoyed drilling down into millennials: three-quarters enjoy growing plants and 72% have “helped with gardening”.
In New Zealand, surveys in 2007-08 indicated gardening was the second-most-common outdoor activity after walking. And a 2010 Herald-DigiPoll survey found six in 10 of us had started growing vegetables in the past 12 months. Hundreds of community gardens have also sprung up. Needs must when the cost of living, er, blooms.
Keeping the bailiff from the door aside, people appear to enjoy gardening.
If gardening is part of your wellbeing routine, you’ll be thrilled to hear research confirms it’s good for you. In 2017, associate professor Masashi Soga from the graduate school of agricultural and life sciences at the University of Tokyo, co-published a meta-analysis of 21 studies looking at the benefits of gardening. He found lots.
Compared with either non-gardeners or themselves before starting gardening, gardeners show significant reductions in mental distress (anxiety, depression) and body mass index, and increased life satisfaction and connection to others. Gardening even seems to delay the onset of dementia, and it can lower your blood pressure and your heart rate after cardiac surgery.
So far, so good. Whenever I see results like this, my next question is to drill down: why does gardening make people happier and healthier?
The mechanism behind physical health outcomes is obvious: A couple of hours of raking and hoeing, pruning and mulching is a pretty good workout, and for many people, is more tolerable than going to the gym. Gardening is particularly preferred to the gym by people aged 65 or more.
Being able to grow something makes us feel good because it makes us feel competent.
There are multiple mechanisms for mental wellbeing improvements. A series of studies (Project Grow) by the University of Roehampton in London showed gardening “therapy” didn’t reduce prevalence of falls among older people (one of the anticipated targets), but did improve feelings of self-efficacy – the feeling you can do the things you want to do. This is mirrored in other studies: being able to grow something makes us feel good because it makes us feel competent.
Gardening is also creative – in the aesthetic decision-making that goes with strategising a flower bed or the production of something that wasn’t there last year, whether a carrot or an astromeria.
Gardening is also brilliant for stress reduction. It has this in common with any non-work activity that allows you to immerse yourself in what you’re doing. As well as the very buzzy opportunity to mindfully focus on a task at hand, there’s also the chance of getting into a flow state, into “the zone”.
Indeed, half of the studies that Soga found for the meta-analysis weren’t just looking at the general public, but intervention studies for people with mental distress or impairment. Horticultural therapy. In my case it’s not so much therapy as anticipatory guilt at the thought I might kill one of the plants grateful students have given me over the years. Maybe, let’s go back to the chocolates or coffee vouchers as a way to say thank you?
