Jill severn's gardening column

Why gardening is a good idea

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There are many reasons not to garden:

Your hands will get dirty and your fingernails will be a mess. It will make you sweaty and tired.

Gardening requires tools, and practice using them. You also have to spend money on seeds, and sometimes plants, manure and mulch.

Plenty of plants – ranging from invasive blackberries and morning glories to fir and cedar trees – will grow without your help. In fact, gardening arguably takes up space that native plants should occupy.

But there are a few reasons to garden, too:

  1. You can graze your way through the garden, eating fresh peas, munching lettuce or broccoli, and snacking on cherry tomatoes. Food that fresh makes you feel you might live to be a hundred.
  2. Gardening is as beneficial as a free trip to the gym or a yoga class. Gardeners stretch, bend, shovel, balance, push wheelbarrows and breathe deeply.
  3. Gardening is quiet. There are no buzzers, bells or recorded messages, and no computers or phone screens. Weeding, for instance, is not just low-tech; it’s no-tech. It’s you, green growing plants, the soil, and your own solitary thoughts and feelings. Paradoxically, it involves a single-minded focus on the task at hand, and a simultaneous freedom for mental wandering and exploration. It promotes rumination. We humans seem to have many chambers in our brains, in the same way cows have multiple stomachs, all digesting at the same time.
  4. For gardeners, the green growing world is up close and beautiful. We see the veins in leaves, the tiny red spots on little white spiders, the pollen piled in the bottom petals of a flower. These sights are endlessly inspiring of awe, and deep gratitude for the loveliness of life and the abundance and endless variety of beauty in the natural world.
  5. Seeing all those things up close helps develop our powers of observation year by year. And the more we see, the more we look and learn. I am finally learning to see the differences among all the varieties of bees in my garden. This is a multi-year project, because I’m a slow learner. Last year I struggled to see what made each species different from the  others. This year, I’ve noticed so much more, like the way big fat bumblebees light on larkspur, and another very distinctive smaller bee species is crazy about echinacea. [Note: Here's an excellent chart showing Washington bees, life-size.]
  6. Gardening makes us partners with natural world rather than just observers or consumers of it. We soon learn that we are the junior partner. That promotes humility, a personal quality well worth cultivating.
  7. We get better at it, even when we don’t try very hard. We are nearly all part-time gardeners, with jobs and relationships and laundry and housework to do. It’s the rare gardener who has unlimited time, a degree in botany, or the affliction of perfectionism. We garden for the joy of watching plants grow, not just for the harvest. We will not starve if a crop fails or a flower doesn’t bloom. But over time, we observe, we learn, we improve, and the satisfaction deepens.

It might be too much to say that gardening makes us wiser, but it certainly makes us calmer and happier, and therefore more capable of contributing to harmony in this turbulent and troubled world.

That’s a good investment of our time, don’t you think?

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com

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  • Drutty

    Yesssss~! "Garden therapy'.....

    Friday, August 12, 2022 Report this

  • PegGerdes

    Great investment. I especially love #5 - the deepening.

    Saturday, August 13, 2022 Report this