Find Your Own Eden
Gardening as a Metaphor for Happiness
Gardeners are energetic and dynamic people. They never run out of ideas and enthusiasm. Maybe it’s the company gardeners keep among the busy pollinators like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Maybe it’s the mesmerizing focus of creativity or the connection to the divine that energizes them. Whatever it is, gardening can be intensely satisfying. Woodsy scents, vivid colors, and dirty hands have a power of persuasion to pull us back to the garden, patio, or arrangement of pots again and again. There’s something about tilling soil that tills the soul. As Joseph Conrad states, the “primeval smell of fecund earth seemed to sting our faces,” so gardening connects soil, body, and soul. It reminds us that we are more than transactional beings. We are cultivators and caretakers.
I am a periodic gardener depending on the amount of free time I have in different seasons of my life. My recent upsurge coincides with the discovery of a YouTube channel called Garden Answer hosted by Laura, a 30-something wife and mother of two who hosts the show that reaches over a million followers. She not only gardens, but she also drives a tractor and a forklift; she lays and fixes sprinklers, transplants trees, and much more in her expansive Eastern Oregon garden.
The first time I watched one of her summer garden tours, I was transposed to an Edenic state of mind. I watched it before bed, and every time I tossed and turned throughout the night, gardening images lulled me back to sleep. I felt like I had stumbled into a magical world of beauty and productivity, like visiting Pandora in the movie Avatar. Her show has become a bedtime routine. Every night, I look forward to seeing her enthusiasm over the next blend of colors and leaf shapes in her garden and to hearing her solutions to gardening failures, which she welcomes as learning experiences. Why am I drawn to her show? It’s because it immerses me in a refreshing reservoir.
It’s a reservoir of joy that is uniquely human. Each of us taps into it with “just because” kind of activities. We push through distractions, practicalities, and the need to be productive to get there. That’s not to say gardening—or other “just because” activities—are impractical. Sure, gardening has a practical side—for example, harvesting some tomatoes or cutting flowers—but few people garden primarily for the harvest. They do it to take a little time to breathe. They do it for other, more personal reasons, which create a sense of well-being and human flourishing. Think about the activities that make you feel truly alive and happy.
Gardening is a resistance against the mechanistic modern view of humanity as defined by what we can accomplish. It creates character traits undervalued in today’s society. We live in a world with excessive distractions, and people often expect instant gratification. These days, it’s difficult to convince many young people that a newly emerged bed of tulips is more interesting than a smartphone. Nurturing a seed from a small speck into a mature plant takes time and persistence—two qualities in short supply in our modern lives. Learning to wait and cope with loss is a reality for a gardener. However, these losses develop the trait of dealing with failure and trying again for a better solution the next growing season. Gardening connects us to loss, failure, and future hope.
The balance between producing and waiting at the heart of gardening is an important teacher. Cultivating a garden requires action, doing, and maintenance, but there is just as much, if not more, waiting for results or fruits. I plant something new and have to envision how it will look in the future. I plant with the future in mind. The look is sparser than I’d like—I want instant growth and blooms—but the delay of gratification is good for me. Each day as I walk around to inspect my plants, I see small changes, and that keeps me going, but it’s slow. The slowness of growth develops patience. This is one reason gardening is important, especially for younger people.
Waiting gives me a sense of my place as a recipient instead of a producer. So much of our lives has to do with the myth of productivity, that all we have to do is decide to act, and we can control the outcome. Certainly, our actions are key and without them, we have weeds, overgrowth, and disorder, but our actions aren’t enough. These things used to be self-evident, but moderns have a way of overestimating their efforts, especially moderns who live cut off from nature in bustling cities of concrete. Waiting slows down my clock to tick more in tune with the way things really are. What slows you down and gives you joy in the process?
Joy is a choice I must make for myself. It doesn’t always come on its own. Deciding to garden—or the activity you enjoy—is self-care, and self-care is essential for a good life. Far from being selfish, self-care is a HEPA filter also defined as a high-efficiency particulate absorbing or arresting filter to clean out the harmful particulates in the environment. We all know the need to arrest the spread of harmful particulates in our current environment. What about our social and personal environments? Will we actually take charge of our lives to filter out toxic attitudes like bitterness, strife, and malice and not be polluted or stained by the world as James 1:27 exhorts us to do? Will we proactively create space to flourish?
Gardening has other beneficial effects. Is it a coincidence that Virginia Woolf experienced an epiphany of what it means to be an artist while walking amid the flower beds in a garden? Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes in a short essay titled “Why We Need Gardens,” about the impact of visiting gardens on people with neurological illnesses:
“As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
A man with Tourette’s syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson’s disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, who can’t recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed.
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.”
The benefits of gardening—or just visiting gardens—are inexhaustible, but they are a reminder of refreshing reservoirs right in our neighborhood. Your path to the reservoir may be something different than gardening, but I hope you talk a walk to the reservoir and keep coming back again and again. Spring is a great time to find your own Eden.
Source Cited:
Sachs, Oliver. Everything in its Place. Knopf, 2019.