How to Garden on the Bad Days
Typically, when you hear the words ‘gardening’ and ‘mood’ thrown into a sentence together you can be relatively sure you’re about to hear a statement about how great gardening is for making you feel happy. And there’s good reason for this. Evidence of the beneficial psychological effects of being in green spaces (in general) and gardening (in particular) is mounting. Among many of its reported benefits, gardening has been shown to reduce anxiety, elevate mood and self-esteem and diminish symptoms of depression. It can even promote positive behavioural changes in children with ADHD and help veterans recovering from PTSD.
That said, the majority of these articles are based on scientific studies conducted at aged care homes, schools, hospitals and prisons. And the one thing they don’t tend to talk about is how participants were encouraged to get into the garden in the first place.
It might be true that gardening can improve your mood but without an entry point to gardening that works for every mood, many of us at home can find ourselves despondent. Too anxious to head outside, too melancholy or lethargic. Too frustrated. And so we turn with a knee-jerk to the general anaesthesia of Netflix, Instagram and other numbing agents that don’t ultimately do us any real good.
The fact is, gardening has got me out of almost every emotional funk I’ve ever been in. I’ve smashed brick walls to find my way out of furious rage, dug holes to push through anxious moods. I’ve sat in the garden, hose running, sobbing over heartbreaks (at this point I should mention I have absolutely no idea what my neighbours think of the howling, cursing and grunting that sporadically emanates from my backyard). The garden has helped me in so many ways and I owe that patch of earth a great deal.
But, as my Grandad would always say, the hardest part is taking the first step out the door, and we can reap none of these benefits if we don’t actually get ourselves out into the garden in the first place.
So, in a week tarnished by yet another COVID lockdown, with grey skies and chilly weather and a vaguely lacklustre feeling in the air, I am writing you a guide for how to garden when you’re in a bad mood. I hope it will help you find your way outside to sit with - or work through - all the feelings you encounter, emotional fists shoved into the soil, guided by bugs and birdsong.
One obvious caveat before I begin: while gardening is indisputably good for us, the recommendations that follow are not based on any clinical or scientifically corroborated advice. There is no study I know of that has specifically shown rose pruning to be a good treatment for anxiety, or bulb planting to alleviate depression. I wish there were. Maybe one day.
But if you’re feeling seriously crappy, you should speak to a professional person (not old muggins over here*) who can really help you (for instance Lifeline or Beyond Blue). This post is nothing more or less than a semi-science-fuelled rant about how I like to garden when I’m feeling anxious/lonely/sad/you name it. I hope it can help you get motivated to head out and garden no matter which side of bed you’ve woken up on.
*In all fairness to myself I do have a PhD in psychology, but my research had absolutely nothing to do with gardening (the madness of that is not lost on me), I’m not a clinical psychologist and, although I have at times been wise, I should probably not be counted on exclusively for life advice.
Anxious
Anxiety: the common cold of psychological ills. It seems to be everywhere and evidence suggests its prevalence is increasing (and has been for a while). Our perception of a ‘normal’ amount of anxiety has become so skewed that, according to one study, the average American kid in the 80s reported more anxiety than kids from the 1950s who had been placed in psychiatric institutions. And that was the 80s! The era of neon leg warmers, Wham! and Back to the Future. Since then we have added Facebook, smartphones, Tik Tok, pandemics and Instagram to our modern menu of disturbing delicacies.
Feeling anxious sucks. Internal jitters and catastrophising, thoughts on loop and endless ruminations. Fortunately gardening can help. One study found that just 30 minutes of gardening lowered cortisol levels (a stress hormone) more effectively than 30 minutes of reading (participants who gardened also ended up feeling more positive than those who read, too).
What should you do in the garden when you’re anxious? Prune roses!
Hear me out: the anxious mind is racy and over-stimulated. It will attach to a thought and chew the marrow out of it. Pruning is the perfect remedy - you get to redirect this hyper-energetic state towards a focused goal. It’s much harder to worry about that last unanswered text, that weird ache in your left arm or whether or not your boss likes you when you’re trying to decide if you should cut a branch at this node or that node.
Before pruning, a rosebush has many qualities of an anxious mind. Tangled, thorny and chaotic.
First: prune away dead and diseased branches. Imagine these branches as your negative, worried thoughts. Acknowledge them and let them pass. Grab a bucket for all the pruned branches.
Next: remove any branches that are growing inwards towards the centre of the bush. These are your tangled thought-loops and brain fog. Remove them and watch as the centre of the rose suddenly becomes spacious and tidy, leaving room for new growth and optimistic possibilities.
Last: remove weak, thin branches (cut each branch back until it is at least as thick as a pencil). Make each cut just above a new bud that is pointing out and away from the centre of the rose. As this bud turns into a new stem it will help the rose branch spaciously outwards. Imagine your thoughts spreading outwards to new horizons too.
Take all your prunings and chuck them in the garbage (not into your compost). Make yourself a cup of tea and sit in the sunshine, surveying your work. In most lives there will be many anxious days. Fortunately most gardens need regular pruning.
Frustrated
Like anxiety, frustration is characterised by a feeling of tension. In this case, coupled with irritation and a sense of being unable to achieve a goal. Maybe your computer crashed and you just lost your last hour of work. Maybe you and a friend can’t see eye to eye on something important. Maybe your day’s just been sucky and unproductive. You feel pushed up against some barrier that you can’t break through. Like you’re inside a thick, inescapable rubber balloon. The solution? Transplanting!
The happy fact is that a wide variety of plants will tolerate being transplanted pretty well, provided you don’t transplant them in high summer or the middle of the day. If it’s a hot day and you’re feeling frustrated I can’t help you. Maybe take a cold bath.
If you ever wanted to shift a plant that just didn’t feel ‘right’, now’s the time. Channel that excess energy and irritation into digging a nice big hole around the plant in question. I know you’re irritable, but try to avoid severing its roots. Dig wide and deep. Lever it up gently, grab it at the base and take it to its new position.
Dig once more - an even bigger hole this time. Let the sweat and exertion start to dissolve your frustrations. Get your hose and fill the hole with water. Pop in the plant and gently push the soil back in around it. Add some compost or well-rotted manure on top (putting the manure on top rather than in the hole is thought to encourage the plant to spread its roots farther into the ground, helping it establish itself faster).
While you’re at it, and if you’re still feeling snarky, why not rip a few things out of your garden entirely? Is your fennel past it? Has your basil finished for the season? Any annuals that are nearing the end of their lives can be unceremoniously pulled from the earth and chucked in the compost pile. Rip them out with vigour, exhaust yourself, then make a cup of tea and sit in your garden, muddied, scuffed and red-faced (but hopefully a little happier than before).
Lonely
It is very hard to feel lonely in a garden because you are never truly alone in a garden. In fact, of all the places in the world, gardens feel - to me - like the ultimate cradle of life. Bugs - many too small to see - crawl and slither, turning the earth underfoot. If you grow flowers the sky will be filled with bees, wasps, hoverflies and cabbage white butterflies. Birds perch in tall trees, skinks sun themselves on warm brick walls.
If your house seems empty and silent and you’re sick of your own echoing thoughts, head outside. Don’t lumber yourself with expectations of achievement today. Don’t plan to weed, or plant, or prune. Go in search of new life instead.
Flip over a brick to find a family of slaters. Follow an ant as it carries food back to the hive. Watch as bees harvest pollen. Look for new, previously unknown insects and try to identify them. See if, in sitting perfectly still, the neighbourhood birds might begin to trust you, to move closer as they search for bugs in the lawn.
Talk to the worms and the ladybirds and plants and feel no shame in doing so. We are all primarily composed of the same four elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen); the most commonly occurring elements in our shared universe. And on this planet, if you go back far enough into the depths of your evolutionary history, you and every animal in your garden share a common ancestor. You are even distantly related to the plants (and relatively less distantly related to the fungi!).
The world can be alienating, confusing and - at times - harsh. You might feel, on occasion, that you are adrift alone on an empty sea. When that happens, try to redirect your thoughts outwards, to the life that is thrumming and buzzing and flitting around you. Cultivate a deep respect for - and curiosity in - the plants and animals who share our world with us and you will be rewarded with millions of tiny, beautiful friends.
Angry
Sometimes you just want to punch something. And that’s ok, as long as it’s not a living something. Or a corpse, because that would be weird.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of inanimate things I have smashed when overcome by today’s fourth emotion - anger:
Five homegrown pumpkins (smashing pumpkins is, incidentally, a fantastically cathartic exercise. The way they break apart and splatter is a joy to behold. Provided your smashing location is relatively clean you could probably even roast and eat the pieces afterwards)
One cupboard door, about 20% off its hinges (this was a worse idea than the pumpkins).
One garden gnome (procured by an individual I didn’t particularly like, this instance of smashing resulted in deep satisfaction and not even a moment of guilt)
One dining chair (it was destined for a verge collection one week later, so really I was just ‘compacting the rubbish’)
Notably, all of these instances of smashing occurred BEFORE I got into gardening. Once I had my garden I was able to channel my anger into much more productive activities. Now, when feeling angry, I find the best remedy is to ever-so-slightly tear apart my backyard.
Conveniently, the big, exciting changes we’d like to make to our gardens usually require a fair amount of energy. Walls that need to be knocked down, pavers that need to be shifted and re-laid. Giant limestone blocks you can barely lift that must be - somehow - turned into aesthetically pleasing edging. Bird of paradise plants that have spread their roots so deep into the earth that their removal seems physically impossible.
On a regular day, none of these activities seem remotely appealing. It’s much more fun to peacefully stare at the flowers and maybe dig up some potatoes. On an angry day, these jobs are pure gold.
Put on some steel-capped boots, you raging, hot-headed monster. Grab a shovel, a jackhammer, a sledgehammer, a pitchfork - just please, nothing that can actually injure you - and tackle your biggest garden project. Preferably something that involves a certain degree of initial destruction.
Sweat and strain until the rage has lost its sharp edge. Exhaust yourself tearing something apart, then start building something new and beautiful in its place. Then take a nap. Next to gardening, a nap is the best salve for a black mood.
Sad
Last on my list, for today at least, is sadness. Sadness is a bummer. It robs you of energy, of motivation and of hope. It can be very, very difficult to summon up the drive to do anything much when you are sad.
But in the garden, this is ok. Unlike most people, your garden doesn’t mind if you are moping. It won’t tell you to cheer up, or that things aren’t as bad as they seem. It doesn’t mind if you cry and it won’t demand that you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and ‘get over it’. In the garden, sadness is just another season, a passing cloud.
Spend your sadness in the garden and through the melancholic fog you will catch brief glimpses of beauty and hope. You might notice a bud on the brink of opening, or take a moment’s break from your thoughts to smell a jonquil. But my biggest gardening recommendation for sad days is: plant something. More specifically, plant bulbs.
If you can muster the motivation, buy a packet of bulbs and a pot full of soil. Push the bulbs down into the pot and water them. Put them somewhere sunny. On the outside, it may look as depressing as ever. A pot full of nothing. But you know that deep under the earth the bulbs are beginning to work their way into life. Roots spreading downwards, a single shoot pushing hopefully upwards.
Our lives are filled with ups and downs which both colour and derail our days. But we can find some solace in the fact that these feelings are almost always ephemeral. Whatever your current sadness may be, allow yourself to consider the possibility that, by the time the bulbs have begun to flower, you might be feeling good once more.
And so ends my philosophical/psychological gardening rant! A slight deviation from usual topics…kinda. But I hope you liked it!
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter what you do in your garden. It’s just being out there in the midst of it all that counts. Find as many ways as you can to do exactly that - I’m certain you’ll never regret it.
Xx Casey
p.s. If you were wondering what activity to do in the garden when you’re feeling jet lagged, the answer is: build a pond.
