Thoughts on Gardening

As we lumber through an early and perhaps false spring with some abnormally high temperatures this past week, I find myself already hoping to see budding plants outside. I am eager for spring, eager for a change from the color of brown to the color of green.

I have turned to the book “The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature” by Sue Stuart-Smith to help calm my feelings of restlessness. Stuart-Smith enumerates many of the healing powers of nature and gardening.  There are unlimited opportunities to benefit emotionally from the natural world. Here are a few of her ideas.

• When we are sad, we want to lean on others, but sometimes we are in too much a state of collapse. Nature can be a comforting place to bare our emotions; the trees, birds, and earth won’t reject us or question our tears.

• Creating a garden or even potting a plant allows us to build a sense of home for ourselves. It also allows us to nurture our creative impulses, something we might not get to do in our working lives.

• Watering plants is calming and fosters a sense of caring for something beyond ourselves. We get to see rebirth and blooming!

• Growing plants from seeds or seedlings exercises our practice of patience and reinforces our lack of control at times, while at the same time, we cannot delay or procrastinate too long, because our seeds will lose the window of time they need to grow. Gardening encourages us to practice hard habits – both patience and then acting fully and with effort at the right moment.

• As well as the pleasures of creation, patience, and hard work, gardening allows us to be aggressive in a contained and productive way; we pull up weeds, we squash pests, we prune. We are given permission to exercise a destructive force, something we might normally suppress, and in this purging, we can feel re-energized. 

• Being outside or even tending to an indoor plant engages our senses. We touch a delicate leaf, velvety and fragile at once. We smell the dirt under our feet. We see the “raggedy sadness” of a dying plant and recognize its aging beauty.

“The Well Gardened Mind” touches on more of the processes of gardening and nature. I can read it while I gaze outside and wonder when spring will come this year. “A garden gives you a protected physical space, which helps increase your mental space, and it gives you quiet, so you can hear your own thoughts.”

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