Gardening is healing therapy.
I joke that my plant is “my son”, “my colleague”, or “my healing animal”, but it’s not completely wrong.
As a freelance writer, I sometimes forgot to leave the house and was stuck for 48 hours when I went out into the backyard to try to work outside. Still, I stooped over my laptop screen under the open sky and casually moved back and forth between 12 tabs. The bookkeeping platform reminded me of scarlet letters of overdue checks owed to me. Five or six different articles mixed up terrible news. All the time horror buffets on Twitter rolled over.
And there was one Google document that looked back at me and was noticeably empty. A desolate page where 2,000 words must eventually be written about the new and frightening abortion restrictions in my home state of Georgia. The cursor blinked on the spot. I closed my eyes.
When I opened it again, my eyes fell on my Sungold tomato plant. I put it in a large plastic pot in early spring, so the plant grew as tall as me and has just begun to bloom some golden flowers. But today, it bears fruit out of the blue. For the first time, I was filled with joy when I saw three small, tight green spheres densely clustered together. I tweeted the photo with a half-sarcastic joke. That’s when I.
My little Atlanta backyard is just a small plot of land, not a scented oasis of fresh green escaping in search of valuable writerly inspiration. There are no grasses, only brown root covers that sometimes poke my barefoot floor. But it has enough nature to put me in the reverie that Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as “silence with a sense of swimming.” Potting gatherings, such as yard sales that do not match the two narrow flower beds, have fragrant sage, basil, and fennel plants. For pollinators, gardenia, geranium, and butterfly bushes bloom. Hanryeon, tomatillo, small lemon trees, purple tea beans, radishes, and strawberries give hope for salads, sauces, and pies.
And of course, I have my tomatoes. I think about them every day. When I planted four slender seedlings that were less than three to four inches tall in April, it was hard to imagine that they would be mature enough to feed me. One friend pointed out that their names sound like lipstick-colored names, such as Indigo Rose, Cherokee Purple, Sungold, and Black Cherry.
My morning routine began to include a small embossed bed and an ambient check around the container that accommodates them. Then I checked several times a day. Evaluate your height, examine small yellow shoots, and look for signs of life. I felt like I was waiting for a love letter. It was a winding but good way.
It’s probably absurd to claim intimacy between myself and plants. I joke that my plant is “my son”, “my colleague”, or “my healing animal”, but it’s not completely wrong. Fatigue and burnout can come quickly without warning in any profession where income is based entirely on creative labor. This is a fairly dangerous occupational risk considering that the ability to pay bills is directly linked to output. I’ll stick to everything that makes me feel grounded.
Not only physical companies but also my plants provide opportunities to meet like-minded people. I now know that there are fewer healthy and pure places on the Internet than Garden Twitter. (Ask the newest entrant, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), where you share updates with fellow plant lovers and request a progress report on your garden. For those who work for themselves and at home, everyday levels of human relationships can be felt rare. I found a little clipping in my DM of people I’ve never met before, tweeting about beans and trading tips about fertilizers.
I’m far from the first person to look for sustainable and therapeutic gardening. Nature writer Robin Wall Kimmer revealed the secret to happiness in a bumper crop of beans. “I certainly knew it was as warm and clear as the sun in September,” she wrote. “The Earth Loves Us Again,” and for novelist Yujin Grace Wuertz, a small basil plant was a lifeboat in which she survived the terrible cycle of rejection and loss. No matter how hard I pushed.”
Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote that New York City’s public garden served as a healing source for patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, as well as an inspirational site for his work. “As a writer, I found a garden essential to the creative process. “As a doctor, I take patients to the garden whenever possible.” He explained that he saw Alzheimer’s patients who lost their memory of basic functions suddenly know exactly what to do with a bunch of seeds and land.
Other doctors and mental health professionals have also recognized the therapeutic effects of gardening and prescribed “horticultural therapy” to help recover from addiction, depression, and other mental health problems. Some studies have shown that common soil bacteria can act as antidepressants in humans. Biologist EO Wilson hypothesized that the love of nature (which he called “biophilia”) is probably genetically rooted in humans. “I know that I instinctively came home from a certain wild environment without understanding what was going on,” he told The Washington Post.
Writing alone can cause mental fog. Even when you don’t seem to be swimming in sorghum, freelance life is inherently unpredictable and uncertain. It can make a person very vulnerable. And the multi-tasking it requires can ruin your attention span. Not to mention managing deadlines, sending invoices, understanding contracts, following up with AWOL editors, constantly creating presentations, setting up interviews, and putting words on white pages.
During working hours I now take a round of the yard, answer the phone, passively look at the yellow pistil, breathe in the chlorophyll breath of tomato leaves, negotiate rates, or ask questions about the source.
Gardening on this scale is not the most efficient or cost-effective way. You’re lucky to get a strawberry a week and still buy most of your groceries at the store. But the reward is deeper than that. In addition to seeds, plants, soil, and supplies purchased, the garden is a site of thousands of small tasks that need to be handled and disturbed, including soil pH, compost, drainage, and irrigation. There is a moisture medium that repels and attracts squirrels, birds, and aphids. Indeed, as Wuertz points out, “There is no end to the amount of interest you can have in your garden.”
But that’s the point. Watching this steady, slow, rhythmic upbringing of life, growing from a green slide to a thriving and lush existence, provides an important string to the present and around me. That is a simple but very profound agreement. I take care of something and that’s what feeds me.