Don’t Doomscroll. Garden
Getting close to nature reveals the true meaning of abundance.
In early March, I visited the 196th Philadelphia Flower Show. Organized by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, this yearly spectacle features elaborate floral and landscape displays, hundreds of vendors, and even a butterfly house, attracting thousands of design enthusiasts, gardening hobbyists, and people of all ages who enjoy wearing flower crowns in public.
The theme was Gardens of Tomorrow. In a recap video, the President of the Philadelphia Horticultural Society described it as “an invitation to explore a botanical world of wonder, innovation, and imagination.”
Essentially Comic Con for plant lovers, the energy was fittingly feel-good. As it turns out, it’s not hard to feel a sense of wonder surrounded by bustling and blooming life, inside a cornucopia of color backdropped by ambient music all within a climate-controlled convention center. The maximalist displays and booths brimming with merchandise were nothing if not on theme: They communicated confidence in the future, a sense of overflowing abundance.
As I drank in the sights and sounds, I was struck by the contrast between the optimism on display and the stormy circumstances that had set the stage for my own interest in gardening.
It’s been five years since the start of the pandemic, but the memory of lockdowns and lost loved ones, miscommunications and collapses of trust, still reverberates through our culture, punctuating the public conversation with pessimism and paranoia.
Mid-pandemic, in the spring of 2021, I was busy planting vegetable seeds in a 6x6 plot in the back of our new townhouse. As a new homeowner, there were plenty of other, more pressing things I could have been doing. But I prioritized shoveling rocks, inserting mesh fencing, and lugging bags of soil onto the lawn—all with a freshly torn anterior cruciate ligament!—just for the chance to get my hands dirty.
My vision was one of total self-sufficiency: I would dry and store herbs, pickle and can vegetables, and ride out the winter with a wholesome harvest like in The Little House on the Prairie. Knowing how to grow food would be a respite and a refuge, but most of all it would be an insurance policy in case shit ever really hit the fan. Covid had taught me that people and institutions I once thought were stable could shift and crumble. So I sought solid ground in the one place I still believed I could find it: Beneath my feet.
I wasn’t the only one.
According to a survey of 201 Americans by HappyGardens, 34% took up gardening or began gardening more around the start of Covid, and 77% of those respondents said they wouldn’t have done so if not for the pandemic.
Another survey from the University of California amassed responses from thousands of people about why they gardened. It found that more than half of them felt “isolated, anxious, and/or depressed during the early periods of the pandemic,” and 81% “had concerns about food access.” The participants rated “stress relief” as the second-most important reason (out of 11 options) for having a garden during the pandemic.
“Gardens were not just sites of respite,” the report says. “Gardeners also saw in gardening an opportunity to take action to help themselves and others in the face of circumstances that otherwise felt largely outside their control.”
Of course, as anyone who’s ever actually tried to garden will tell you, it’s not as easy as “plant seeds, receive bountiful harvest.” Growing anything at all takes patience, hard work, and dedication, and ultimately nature gets the final say. From pests to pollination to bad weather to soil quality, there are countless ways things can go sideways.
In a session at the Flower Show that took a more pragmatic than decorative approach to plants, author and home gardening advocate Ashlie Thomas drove this point home, sharing tactics for battling aphids, the elements, and the limitations of small spaces.
“One thing being a gardener teaches us is that we are not in control,” she concluded.
Today, I pluck most of my food from grocery shelves instead of tomato vines. But I still plant seeds every spring. Why garden at all, knowing that the dream of total self-sufficiency is unrealistic for me?
Precisely for that valuable reminder.
The University of California study unearthed more than a desire for control and security at the root of peoples’ desire to cultivate plants. “They also expressed heightened experiences of joy, beauty and freedom in garden spaces,” placing “connecting with nature” as the number one reason for gardening. What’s more, the practice brought people into a relationship with their community, reminding them of their interdependence on one another.
This tracks with my experience. The time and effort required to grow a single pepper plant from seed underscores how miraculous it is that anything functions correctly, and doing it has deepened my appreciation for the human effort and ingenuity behind modern conveniences. Losing myself in nature also reminds me how small I am, but not in a bad way. Like staring up at a night sky full of stars, digging into the earth can draw our attention to the fact that we’re part of something so much larger than ourselves, that our fantasies of control are just that—fantasies.
At the same time, gardening reveals that our actions do make a difference. The seeds we plant today sometimes bear fruit, and even when they don’t, the seeds of our efforts do—sometimes in more abstract ways than we imagine.
“Man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon,” wrote Marcus Aurelius. “If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged.”
Amid the ceaseless churn of the 24-hour news cycle, looming international conflicts, rumors of an impending recession, and tech developments that threaten to upend familiar ways of working and living, choosing to be dragged is no less tempting today than it was at the start of the pandemic. It’s also no more effective.
Gardening as a hobby can show us that the spirit in which we respond to our circumstances matters at least as much as what we do to confront them. Our attitude is the beating heart of our actions.
With that in mind, I’ll be planting seeds with enthusiasm this year, prepared to lose some battles with the elements, but not to lose hope that the effort is worthwhile.
If that’s not abundance, I’m not sure what is.
Talia Barnes is a writer and multimedia artist exploring media, culture, and expression.
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You had quite the ambition for your garden! Having done all the dehydrating and canning I'm going to do for years--saving a true collapse in our food supply chain--I can testify to the demands as well as rewards of all that. Right now, I am down to some Swiss chard, carrots and tomatoes, plus some herbs. Hard to find enough sun here in my citified retirement digs, but I try! Why? The miracle of planting a tiny seed that grows into a nine foot tomato plant never fails to awe me. And the 'maters still taste better warm from the vine than the refrigerator section of the supermarket! And don't forget the flowers. Beauty is important in its own way.
There is something fundamental in ingedient to a healthy human phycology that requires we make, grow or fix things with our hands.