We’re all familiar with the physical benefits of gardening. Actions like squatting down to plant seedlings in the ground or bending over to tie tomato branches to vertical supports provide opportunities for stretching and gentle exercise. Hauling and spreading compost or digging holes to plant fruit trees offer more vigorous activity. Tending our gardens in the sunlight allows our bodies to manufacture the vitamin D we need to reduce inflammation and maintain healthy bones.
These benefits are well documented and understood. But while we may intuit that working outdoors with plants offers benefits beyond the physical, those perks have been less frequently studied.
More and more researchers, however, have begun looking at the additional benefits of gardening, of being outdoors and of close encounters with the natural world. We’re gaining a much clearer understanding of how puttering among our plants supports our mental health. Here are four research-based findings on how gardening keeps us mentally well:
1. Time spent in natural settings decreases rumination. Rumination is the phenomenon of running around and around the hamster wheel in your head, cycling through the same ideas and thoughts over and over again. People who ruminate are at increased risk of developing depression and other mental illnesses.
Stanford researcher Greg Bratman showed in a 2015 study that 90 minutes of nature exposure dramatically reduced rumination in study subjects. It seems that spending time in nature pulls us out of our own heads. We tune in to our surroundings by sinking into sensory experiences. Our gardens offer so much to see, smell, hear, touch and taste in our gardens; they provide the ideal setting where we can immerse ourselves in the present rather than rehashing the past or worrying about the future.
2. Gardeners experience greater life satisfaction. Pyschologist Carl Jung was an avid gardener. For several months out of every year, he lived at his home on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he would write in the mornings and then work outdoors, gardening and cooking over a wood fire, in the afternoons.
“For it is the body, the feeling, the instincts, which connect us with the soil,” he wrote in The Earth Has a Soul: C. G. Jung On Nature, Technology & Modern Life. “At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree,…in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.”
Related: "Why Gardens and Gardening Matter"
That sense of the interconnectedness of all life that Jung describes is one aspect of life satisfaction. Gardeners have a front-row seat to seasonal shifts and changes, to the life cycle of caterpillars and butterflies, of bees, of birds, of tomato plants and Cosmos. This intimacy and connection with other life forms provides perspective and proportionality, potentially shifting one’s focus from worry or self-absorption to gratitude for being part of the big, pulsing heartbeat of life.
3. Using one’s hands and providing for oneself increases resiliency and a sense of control. Some mental illnesses are characterized by intrusive, often negative thoughts that are frequently triggered by stress and anxiety. Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has found that tending things—like plants—by hand increases mental well-being by connecting us to age-old endeavors that engender pleasure, meaning and pride.
By positively altering our physical environment, as we do when we create a garden, our actions produce a tangible result. Our belief in our ability to shape our lives strengthens when we shape our physical environment. Like Carl Jung, we feel more connected to the world around us, and we increase our sense of agency and our confidence in our ability to provide for ourselves.
4. Gardening supports and enhances creativity. A 2015 study by Scandinavian researchers looked at the impact of nature exposure on creativity. Study participants reported that nature exposure makes them more curious and more eager to explore connections. Since the garden is different every day, it offers endless changing and stimulating input. The variety of sensory stimuli—birdsong, buzzing bees, colors and textures and fragrances—inspired creative behaviors and made participants more open to new and different ideas. They also reported that the quiet and peacefulness of the garden provided space for new perspectives and creative problem-solving to evolve.
As scientists amass a growing body of findings that underscore the mental-wellness benefits of gardening, we can hope that this research will help shape policies that govern how we educate, how we work and how we live. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone had the opportunity to grow and tend plants? It would almost certainly be a very different world.
