The Psychology Behind Gardening

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 7:20 am

: Image by Denis Collette…!!! via Flickr

I don’t know what it is about a garden that has always drawn humans to them. But they’ve always been very popular, and an intrinsic part of peoples’ lifestyles. Most religions feature gardens as the settings for quite a few of the largest occasions As reported by Christianity, humanity was started in a garden and the son of God was resurrected in a garden. The Buddhist build gardens to allow nature to permeate their environment. Virtually every major palace and government building has a garden. But what’s so great about them? They’re just a bunch of plants, on balance.

Needless to say, the reasoning is fairly obvious behind why people grow food in gardens. It’s to eat! If you live off the fat of the land and actually survive on stuff from your garden, it’s simple to figure out the reasoning. But I’m considering those people who plant flower gardens just in the interest of looking nice. There is no immediate benefit that I can observe; you just have a group of flowers in your yard! However, after thinking extensively about the motivation behind planting decorative gardens, I’ve conceived several potential theories.

Gardening Advice

I think one reason people like gardens so much is that while we have a natural desire to progress and industrialize, deep within all of us is a primal love for nature. While this desire may not be as strong as the hope for modernism, it is still strong enough to compel us to create gardens, small outlets of nature, accompanied by all our hustle and bustle. Since being in nature is like regressing to an earlier stage of humanity, we too can regress to a time of comfort and utter happiness. This is the reason why gardens are so relaxing and calming to be in. This is why gardens are a respectable place to meditate and do tai chi workouts. A garden is a way to rapidly escape from the busy world.

I’ve thought sometimes that perhaps we as humans feel a kind of guilt driving us to regenerate nature and care for it. This guilt could stem from the knowledge that we, not personally but as a race, have destroyed so much of nature to get where we’re today. It’s the least we can get done to create a small garden in remembrance of all the trees we kill each day. It’s my theory that this is the cause for the majority of people to take up gardening as a hobby.

Gardening is unquestionably a healthy addiction though, don’t get me wrong. Any hobby that provides physical exercise, helps the environment, and improves your food consumption can’t be a negative thing. So despite what the underlying psychological cause for gardening is, I think that everyone ought to continue to do so. In the United States especially, which is addressing excessive weight and pollution as its two major problems, I think gardening can simply serve to improve the state of the world.

Obviously I’m no psychologist; I’m just a curious gardener. I often stay up for hours questioning what makes me garden. What is it that makes me go outside for a few hours each day with my gardening tools, and facilitate the small-time growth of plants that would grow naturally by themselves? I may never know, but in this instance ignorance truly is bliss.

To know more about gardening, please check out Easy Gardening