The Psychology Behind Gardening
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 integral part of peoples’ lifestyles. Most religions feature gardens as the settings for some of the biggest events According to 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 surroundings. Almost every major palace and government building has a garden. But what’s so good about them? They’re just a group of plants, after all.
Of course, 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 easy to comprehend the reasoning. But I’m thinking about those individuals who plant flower gardens just for the sake of looking nice. There is no immediate benefit that I can watch; 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.
I think a good reason people like gardens so much is although 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 powerful as the hope for modernism, it is still sufficiently strong to compel us to create gardens, small outlets of nature, among all our hustle and bustle. Since being in nature is like regressing to an earlier stage of humanity, we too can regress to an occasion 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 fine place to meditate and do tai chi workouts. A garden is a way to quickly 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 are today. It’s the least we can do to construct a small garden in remembrance of all the trees we kill daily. It’s my theory that this is the cause for most people to take up gardening as a spare time activity.
Gardening is definitely a wholesome trait though, don’t get me wrong. Any hobby that provides physical exertion, helps the surroundings, and improves your diet plan cannot be a negative thing. So despite what the underlying psychological cause for gardening is, I believe that everyone should carry on do so. In the USA particularly, which is handling excessive weight and pollution as its two major problems, I think gardening can only assist improve the state around the world.
Of course I’m no psychologist; I’m just a curious gardener. I often stay up for hours wondering what makes me garden. What is it that makes me go outside for a couple of hours on a daily basis with my gardening tools, and facilitate the small-time growth of plants that would grow naturally by themselves? I might never know, but in this case ignorance truly is bliss.
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