Planting Perspective
A Gardener’s Guide to Being a Better Human
We have less farmers than we need, and more people with mental health issues than ever before. Could meeting in the middle reconnect us all?
The following is the transcript from a talk I gave at BIL: Los Angeles over the weekend. A link to the video version is at the end of this article as well.
I started my garden because I needed to rebuild trust with the universe. I needed to feel competent at something, to produce tangible growth without the interference of external voices.
I needed something to do and think about on a daily basis so I no longer felt like a failure at life, something to distract myself from the wrongs of the world, to hold myself accountable for a routine project, to feel like I was helping solve a problem on my own terms… to be less angry about life in general.
Gardening has that effect on you. It doesn't allow you to half-ass it, to turn on cruise control and check out. Every task pulls you in. There’s the intentional and repetitive motion of pulling weeds that allows your mind to wander (but not too far.) There’s the constant engagement of checking things like soil vitals and planting hole depths and figuring out what needs to be pruned or harvested.
And that’s really the thing about a garden: the more love you’re willing to give it, the more it will give to you in return.
And sure, you can buy a garden, but you can’t buy the sense of fulfillment you get from tending to it yourself- that’s something that you have to earn.
The other evening I came home from a really long day at work. My hands were full of mail, arms weighed down by groceries, brow furrowed from sitting in traffic for the last hour. My to-do list felt like it was a mile long and that didn't even include sweeping the floors. I dreaded the idea of walking in my front door, and I was angry at having to do MORE work after working all day long, so I dropped everything in the kitchen, poured myself a glass of wine, went back outside, sat down on my patio, and wasted half an hour or more on my phone. And then I took a deep breath and I walked back inside.
And that’s when I saw it. A small passion fruit seedling, sitting on my windowsill, withered and gasping for life. And I realized, at some point, in the rushing around and saying I’m too busy and saying I’ll get to it later when I have more time, I had completely forgotten about it. It hadn't done anything to upset me… I was just so overwhelmed with everything else, I had literally checked out of the most meaningful part of my world and in the process, I had ignored it. And now it was dying.
We live in an incredibly fast paced world, full of instant gratification in the form of likes and right swipes and retweets. We are told that we can lose weight in a month, learn a language in a week, become a millionaire overnight. We are praised for being hyper-productive, for filling our time and space with busyness, and we seek the accolades that come with benchmarks we know we can hit, rather than choosing to work in spaces that require quiet dedication to cultivating and amassing knowledge.
After all, who will notice if we do that? Who will praise us for it?
It is such a rarity to encounter anything that isn't immediately attainable in the modern world, and when we do, we almost never regard it for the gift that it is. We hate being patient. We hate waiting.
I have a lot of people approach me on a regular basis and say, “Oh I wish I could grow a garden like you do- I just don’t have the time”, or “if only I could keep a plant alive… I just don’t understand how to do it.” And all I can think is “you DO have time, and you CAN do it… you just have to see why it’s important to you to do it first.” And the last time I had this conversation for maybe the thousandth time, I went home thinking… WHY IS IT IMPORTANT? WHY DO I CARE? WHY DO I REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS? Because yeah, growing my own food is cool. Walking out the back door of my kitchen with a flashlight to pick thyme or parsley or lemongrass for my dinner mid-cooking is really, really cool. But it’s so much more than that.
I was a really angry person for years. The hardest part about being angry is that it’s not socially acceptable to be it. The hardest part about being angry is that you’re supposed to pretend you’re happy until you actually believe it and the anger magically goes away, only it doesn't work like that. It fills you with anxiety, and depression, and distrust, and sadness, and you can’t figure out where it’s coming from and the wheels in your brain just spin and spin until you breathe into paper bags and burst into tears and you don’t know what to do anymore.
There have been dozens of articles written about the healing powers of gardening, but so few of them actually leave you feeling more than “that’s great- they rehabbed those prisoners” or “that’s really cool- that city came together and collectively fought obesity…”
There is rarely a second thought about the potential psychological impact of gardening, and so it’s a hard thing to truly grasp… unless you've experienced it.
This is the funny part of it all. How many of you would really love to be more patient and less anxious, less easily irritable, less angry? And again, how many of you would give anything to feel more present and just completely trust the process?
Well… guess what it takes to be a better gardener? It takes good soil and sunlight and water, sure… but that’s such a small percentage of the equation.
But back to the dying passion fruit vine.
What happens if you pass another life that is struggling, and you don’t bother to notice it because you’re too busy with yourself?
Well, in short, it suffers. And ignored long enough, it dies. People kill plants because of a number of factors: bad soil, pests, disease… but I’d venture to guess that the number one reason plants actually die in someone’s garden is neglect.
I've learned this the hard way. If I want to be a successful gardener, I have to pay attention on a daily basis. Insects can multiply and wipe out an entire crop overnight, or a heat wave can parch your soil two days earlier than your watering app said it should. And because nothing about the weather is certain, I have to snap myself out of my own head and engage with the living things all around me. I gladly choose to take some of the moments I’d spend watching TV or going out with friends for happy hour pulling weeds or watering instead. I will and I have cancelled plans because there was rain in the forecast and I needed to get seeds in the ground immediately.
And whenever life gets hard, the best choice I can make for myself is to go outside, and quietly sit on the path in my garden, bending down to the level of my plants to look and touch and taste and smell and listen and completely engage all of my senses. Have you ever tried to be angry with a face full of mint, or a nose full of lavender? A mouthful of strawberries? It’s damn near impossible.
In these moments, I have zero fear of missing out, because I know I’m not the one missing out.
I’m the one who has been gifted time to think. Quiet. Solitude. I find meditation in the repetitive motions of pulling weeds and planting seeds, and because those motions are my sole focus at those moments, everything else melts away. Problems I couldn't solve throughout the day are suddenly much more clear. The ecosystem I've created constantly offers answers, and I've learned that if I slow down enough and just marvel in awe, I can often unlock these insights.
It is somewhat ironically in these moments of connection with something other than myself that I find connection with myself, and not only have glimpses of that peace and clarity and confidence that I crave, but begin to feel like I can actually embody it.
When I look up, and I take in the living world around me, and I engage with it, my brain starts working better, and I start connecting the dots, and I start seeing the bigger picture.
So another reason people give me for not gardening is “I don’t know how.” This strikes me as such a weird response… like, I really struggle to understand people who just stop learning. I don’t think anyone necessarily wakes up one day and decides, “That’s it- I know everything I need to know. All done here…” I think that between graduating from institutionalized education and finding out what you can and can’t do in a corporate environment, it kind of just happens. You’re taught the rules, and then told to play by the rules, and you’re rewarded for doing so, or punished if you don’t, often without a real grasp of why you’re doing this. You just know that you should.
Follow the rules and you’re almost always guaranteed success. At least that’s what we’re told from an early age. Rules create safe confines in which to operate. They are COMFORTABLE. Who likes to be uncomfortable? And yet, the people that I associate with success aren’t exactly known for lock-stepping with the rest of the drumline in the parade. Because you know what else rules are? BORING. LIMITING. CREATIVELY STIFILING. And while gardening has some rules (like you kind of need to water and have some source of light) after a certain point, the rules don’t apply across the board for every situation.
And I think that’s what scares people about gardening.
Because if there aren’t enough rules to guarantee success 100% of the time, and if it takes work and research and trial and error, then why bother?
I’d argue that this is the exact reason TO bother. The problem is, and this really is the biggest problem: experimenting can be scary. It’s been years since many of us have thought about doing it. A lot of us have failed too one too many times. Experimenting requires you giving so much more of yourself in the moment than a rule book does; mentally, you can’t just set yourself on autopilot and coast through the unknown as easily as you can with a preset map. You are required to be more alert, more aware, more present, more invested in the now. And that’s just the thing- having a set of rules is easy. It’s safe. It doesn't require a whole lot of real, active investment once you've figured it out. It’s almost too easy to be lazy and disconnect if you know exactly what you’re expected to do and not do.
But I can’t garden like that, and I see no reason for anyone else to either. When you've started with a solid outline and you begin to have a grasp of what’s around you, you begin to feel confident expressing yourself through a new medium, and you suddenly have the opportunity to try new things and push boundaries.
But unlike at school or work, no one is going to tell you that there’s only one right way to do it, that you’re doing it wrong; your results will speak for themselves.
And no one is going to tell you that you’ve learned all there is to know, that you’re ready for graduation; that’s technically impossible. And that is awesome.
As a type A somewhat reformed OCD perfectionist, gardening has completely changed my attitude towards not only what I think I know, but towards failure as well. My garden isn’t a place in which I have to abide by rigorous guidelines and wait for the direction of others. It is my safe space to explore, and experiment, and love, and push boundaries, and PLAY. And that last one is so crucial.
Adults don’t have recess anymore- we’ve lost sight of the value of playing, of trying new things out, of not over-calculating risk or tangible ROI at every turn. But I believe a daily hour-long, even half hour recess outdoors is crucial to our well being as mentally stable humans.
We NEED this break… WE NEED TO PLAY.
It’s no surprise that the moment we stop taking time to make up games and experiment and try things out without fear of failing is the exact moment that we start to feel like something is missing in our lives.
And sure, when I experiment, sometimes plants die. Sure, sometimes my attempts at experimentally short-cutting any one process to find a new efficiency sometimes creates more work for myself. But because I’m constantly building and creating something, the effects of these failures and setbacks are less severe- I don’t even see them as failures to be honest. It’s kind of — oh well, just another learning tool shaping my world. And then suddenly failure is nothing more than the name for this game of testing your own limits and beliefs, and willingness to trust the process, and your own tenacity, and guess what?
In gardening? You can’t lose unless you quit.
Oh and P.S. here’s a weird secret: every gardener kills some plants, we just don’t usually talk about it. It’s kind of like how every human is a little insecure… we just don’t usually talk about it.
(Addendum: I was asked several times after presenting this as a talk, “But… what happened to the passion fruit seedling?” It was not my intention to leave anyone hanging with that story! Because I caught it in the moment that evening, I watered it, and it survived, minus a few leaves but otherwise unscathed. I know I had a few people hoping that it would come back as some brilliant allegory at the end of the tale, some sort of payoff. Although I didn’t work it back in, it still kind of is that metaphor, in a way: awareness, slowness, and presence can save lives. There are so many living things in our world that could use a little TLC, both people and plants. And few actionable things will re-instill that sense of “life’s totally still worth living” more than caring for another living thing, and knowing that your quiet nurturing keeps it alive.)
