On Gardening | Halcyon

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life - and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist - while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Picture credit: Plantaholics

Today science is validating what gardeners have known for hundreds of years. One of the largest studies to date on gardens and gardening, by the National Institute for Health Research, found that the benefits of gardening were similar to the difference in health between the wealthiest people and the poorest people in the country. It reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, promotes feelings of mastery, accomplishment and competence, higher levels of self-efficacy, self-esteem, and psychological wellbeing.

For The Economist, the garden is a moral environment. The condition of your garden, like the state of your teeth or the details of your browsing history, is a reasonable indicator of the condition of your soul. Anyone who has poured themselves another late-night glass of wine instead of going out to pluck snails from the vegetable patch will know this. Even if you do your duty, rummaging in the dark and peeling little wet bodies from stalks and leaves, the ethical problems keep coming. Do you smash them on the patio? Rehouse them in some unweeded corner? Toss them into your neighbour’s garden under cover of darkness? If only God had thought about such questions when drafting the Ten Commandments.

For Mary Reynolds, we should practice acts of restorative kindness (ARK) in our gardens.

A new lightweight soil has been designed for rooftop urban gardens. The soil is made from only natural and recycled components. Why does this matter? Well, by 2050, up to 80% of the earth’s population may reside in urban centres, so it is imperative that new ways are found to increase food production in cities,

Scientists sought to develop a “wellbeing blueprint” for gardens, that is hoped could be used in the green spaces of schools and hospitals. Researchers are using the Royal Horticultural Society experimental garden to observe the range of emotions it evokes in people, by splitting it up into sections with different coloured flowers and scents.

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices - parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden, noted Maria Popova, who has also shared reflections on gardening from Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, and Jamaica Kincaid,

There is a steadily growing movement for giving aspects of the natural world the legal status of personhood. The rationale is to preserve healthy ecosystems and the biodiversity that natural areas harbour, to protect them from exploitation, and to recognise their cultural importance to indigenous peoples. Given that we already grant the status of legal personhood to corporations, such as Amazon, why not also the Amazon rainforest? Ecuador was the first country to enshrine legal rights to nature in its constitution, and other countries such as New Zealand have followed suit. Now some are even raising questions about how we would garden, if we were to treat plants with dignity and recognise their rights.

Some think that the recent epiphany in gardens and mental health is a new discovery, but gardens have long been linked to good health and quiet reflection. In fact, the late 20th-century rift in our relationship with the natural world can be seen as a historical blip in an otherwise unbroken bond between man and nature. The well-documented surge in interest in the natural world during the pandemic was in fact a restoration of a healthier relationship that we as a society had been enjoying for centuries.