The Psychology of Gardening

Harriet Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315460833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Why do so many people love gardening? What does your garden say about you? What is guerrilla gardening?

The Psychology of Gardening delves into the huge benefits that gardening can have on our health and emotional well-being, and how this could impact on the entire public health of a country. It also explores what our gardens can tell us about our personalities, how we can link gardening to mindfulness and restoration, and what motivates someone to become a professional gardener.

With gardening being an ever popular pastime, The Psychology of Gardening provides a fascinating insight into our relationships with our gardens.

1

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Stepping into the garden

The gardening context

Gardening is one of the most popular leisure activities. Twenty-seven million people in the UK report a personal interest or active engagement in gardening, and many millions of people visit gardens every year. When they are asked, gardeners can talk at length about doing their garden and the opportunity for being creative or growing their own food. If asked why they garden, they say it ‘keeps me sane’ or ‘connects me to nature’.

People who garden at home or on their allotment are healthier and happier than those who do not. In 2004, the psychologist Aric Sigman suggested that regular gardening could cut health care costs, even claiming that gardening could be saving lives. Research regularly demonstrates that activities done outdoors (including exercise and gardening), the presence of plants or trees in outdoor and indoor public spaces, visits to urban parks and seeing natural views from a window can all lower stress hormone levels and improve adults’ and children’s mental health, well-being and productivity. There is now strong and growing evidence that nature is good for human physical and mental health, and that ‘a regular dose of gardening can improve public health’. Given this ringing endorsement of the many potential benefits of gardening and nature, what does psychology have to contribute? The purpose of this book is to find out.

In its broadest sense, psychology is about understanding human behaviour and human relationships. Gardening is certainly a form of human behaviour, carried out in a particular place and involving a relationship with nature. Can it really save lives? What is the evidence for its positive effects? How does research explain the enduring attraction of gardens and gardening for some people? And where does that leave people who are no longer able to garden or are not interested in gardening? The following chapters examine the research and the theories that might help explain what is special about gardening and why it matters so much to the people who do it. First, this chapter briefly summarises some background information about gardens and gardening. It goes on to review how research is carried out to unearth more information about gardening and psychology.

Defining gardening

Dictionaries define a garden as an area, piece or plot of land, near to or adjoining a house, where plants, flowers, shrubs, trees, grass and vegetables may be grown or cultivated. A garden can also be a container, like a window box, planted with a variety of plants. In the United States, ‘garden’ refers typically to a vegetable garden and ‘yard’ (as in backyard) to a flower or ornamental garden. The definitions include gardens as parks or public recreation areas, or as ‘ornamental grounds laid out for public enjoyment and recreation’, such as botanical gardens. The verb ‘to garden’ means ‘to lay out, cultivate, or tend’ a garden or to ‘cultivate as a garden’. Gardening is the ‘job or activity of working in a garden, growing and taking care of the plants and keeping it attractive’ and includes the concept of gardening ‘as a pastime’ or ‘the work or art of a gardener’.

People garden not only at home if they can, but they also garden on allotments or similar plots, which are not necessarily next to a house. An allotment is a piece of ground let out for spare time cultivation under a public scheme. In the UK, allotment gardens are located on sites in towns, cities and in the country. They are owned and administered by local authorities who charge a minimal rent for the individual plots. These sites are usually run by a member association and often have outer boundary fencing although they vary in the way that individual plots are demarcated from one another, typically paths or hedges. Allotment gardens exist elsewhere, involving community or municipality ownership, making garden and growing facilities available to local residents without gardens or with limited economic resources. Allotments are strongly supported in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. In Canada and the US, allotments are known as community gardens. In the UK, plots were originally intended for vegetable production, but ornamental gardening is allowed. Sheds or structures are permitted, but permanent residence is not allowed.

Figure 1.1 Definitions of ‘garden’, ‘gardening’ and ‘allotment’ from Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster and Collins dictionaries

Gardening is defined as a range of activities related to a place, an activity and plants/nature, incorporating the concepts of work, care and land. Definitions encompass ideas of beauty and enjoyment. These ideas regularly appear in gardeners’ conversations about their gardens and underpin evidence for and support the psychological meaning of gardening. Thus, gardening can be characterised as an activity that happens in a (private) bounded space or area, usually but not always near home. The human cultivation and tending of that space make a difference to it; with an edible or an aesthetic natural outcome. These two distinguishing features are explored further in Chapters 2 and 4.

Who gardens?

Gardening is something that anyone can do, at any age and at any scale, as long as they have somewhere or something to garden. It is estimated that 87% of households in the UK have access to a domestic garden of some kind. Even without a home garden, there are balconies, roofs and window ledges for small or large containers, pots, window boxes and indoor plants in pots. Evidence from Australia suggests that homeowners there are incorporating more of their garden into space for the house, potentially restricting the plot for gardening at home.¹ Domestic gardens and allotments provide vital urban green spaces for wildlife and biodiversity, as well as spaces for personal and social activity. Community-owned and municipal allotments have had a resurgence; in some places the waiting lists for allotments are closed because demand is so high. There are also community garden projects and increasing sightings of opportunistic or ‘guerrilla’ gardening in unused spaces on pavements, around trees and in vacant or disused lots as well as roadside pop-up and pocket gardens, available to those without a garden (see Chapter 6).

Gardening is most commonly reported as a leisure activity by homeowners over the age of 35. In a 2010 UK survey, 62% of homeowners ages between 45 and 65 reported that they had gardened in the last 12 months. People under 35 are catching up fast, but only 16% of 16–24-year-olds admitted to gardening (Social Trends 41). In 2015 nearly three quarters of 65–74-year-olds were engaged in gardening in the UK, rather confirming the view that gardening is for old people. Certainly, gardening seems to be more common in older age groups. Also, 57% of the 27 million gardeners in the UK are women. It could be either that women are over-represented in older age groups because they live longer than men, or that gardening has special meaning for women (see Chapters 2 and 6).

Gardening is popular everywhere. In Japan, 32 million people (25% of the population) take part in daily gardening as a hobby; in the US in 2016, 118 million people (around 35% of the population) had gardened in the previous six months. Five million of these were new gardeners under 35 (the so-called millennials). In addition, there are many long-standing programmes and new initiatives taking place through schools and gardening organisations around the world. The goal is to get children (and other non-gardeners) engaged in gardening activities as a means of improving diet and environmental awareness and putting children in touch with nature.

Garden visiting

Visitor numbers confirm the continuing popularity of garden visiting. For example, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had 1.6 million visitors in 2015, and the Eden Project biodomes in Cornwall received one million visitors. In the same year, the Australian National Botanic Gardens at Canberra and Monet’s Garden at Giverny in France each received around 500,000 visitors. People also attend national and local horticultural or garden shows and open their own gardens to the public. Under national and open garden schemes, around 4,000 private gardens across the UK (and Europe) are opened to the public every year (the proceeds of which go to charity), with visitor numbers well over half a million annually in the UK. The internationally renowned RHS Chelsea Flower Show, held in London in May, attracts approximately 157,000 paying visitors over its five days (a number limited by the site capacity), and millions see it on television (3.14 million in 2017). These formally recorded visits are only the tip of the iceberg, since they do not include regular everyday use of public parks in cities and towns, designed to provide ‘green lungs’ for urban spaces. Chapter 5 explores whether garden visiting has the same potentially beneficial qualities as gardening.

Garden history and garden meanings

Most people who garden today do so in their own domestic garden or on their allotment, in the town or in the country. The principle of Garden Cities, proposed by Ebenezer Howard in the late 19th century, was to provide green spaces for private and public use and affordable housing for all citizens, with front and back gardens, on tree-lined roads (see also Chapters 5 and 6). His ideas led to the development of the first Garden City in the UK at Letchworth in Hertfordshire. They were subsequently carried through into other British planning developments like Hampstead Garden Suburb, and prefigured the rise of the suburbs, which arose during the expansion of towns and cities between and after the two world wars. The suburbs were seen as a refuge from city life, a peaceful place to return to and do the garden after work. The ‘everyday Eden’ that emerged in the process undoubtedly contributed to the iconic image of England as ‘a nation of gardeners’, and makes reference to an idyllic Arcadian past, where everything in the garden was lovely, if not for all at least for most. Gardening as a leisure pursuit for the many, rather than as a necessity or as a form of paid or unpaid labour, is relatively recent in the long history of gardens.

Garden history has described and delighted in the creation of both famous gardens that have changed the landscape and domestic gardens, specialist gardens and the human efforts devoted to the collection and development of plant species, and of course the various technical innovations (such as the lawnmower) to assist budding and established gardeners. Garden historians have also explored the value of gardens for personal and social pleasure, as well as changing fashions and techniques that influence how choices are made in and about gardens. In this history, the creation of gardens either as spaces for contemplation, beautification or food production represents the combination of nature and human effort that defines gardening. The meaning of gardens is also part of garden history; the idea of the Garden of Eden and Paradise as a garden has permeated literature, art and design. Gardens continue to symbolise, for example, refuge and safety, as well as represent social and cultural meanings of order and control over nature.

Gardens feature prominently in literature because ‘they offer an abundant metaphoric range of images that help propel fictive, poetic and dramatic narratives’.³ The concept of plot embedded in the garden metaphor represents not only a place but also the planning and execution of a political scheme or a dramatic narrative. In Shakespeare, garden similes can denote sinister goings-on. The ‘unweeded garden that grows to seed … possessed by things rank and gross in nature merely’ in Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 2), for example, refers to the depravity of the state of Denmark evidenced by the murder of Hamlet’s father, and his mother’s marriage to his uncle. Literature is filled with examples of the garden as a simile or as a metaphor, frequently for enclosure and privacy, for retreat, for hidden thoughts and activities and for representing natural (and sexual) instincts and human interventions into natural processes. Symbolising gardens as retreats has them as places of mystery and containment where magical things can happen. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden illustrates both the trope of the garden in literature and the concept of the healing power of gardens and gardening. Literary references to gardens abound, particularly as a proxy for keeping nature under control, including human attempts to overcome primitive urges. For example, in Mansfield Park, Jane Austen refers to the dangers associated with leaving the confines of the garden and straying into the wilderness beyond the garden boundary. The heroine, Mary Crawford, envies gardeners as ‘the only people who can go where they like’, able to transgress the boundaries between nature under control and the wilderness beyond; well-brought-up young women strayed beyond the gate at their peril.

The language and metaphors of gardening and cultivation are not limited to literature; they are part of everyday conversation. It doesn’t take long to harvest a crop of English words and phrases that refer to some aspect of gardens, plants or gardening. Examples include being rooted to the spot, cultivating your potential, sowing the seeds of an idea, having roses in your cheeks, being a shrinking violet or a late bloomer, deciding to branch out, getting rid of the dead wood, avoiding being led up the garden path and digging your heels in. Online searches for ‘growing’ and ‘cultivating’ produce over one billion and 48 million hits, respectively. Clearly, gardens and gardening activities have taken root in people’s daily lives.

Who is interested in gardening?

Academic and professional interest in gardens, gardening and horticulture has blossomed. Experts and practitioners in geography, sociology, health, sports sciences, occupational therapies, landscape design and architecture, as well as in the arts and literature, have dominated research on gardens and gardening. Despite the interest from other disciplines, gardening has received surprisingly little attention from psychology, apart from a study by a pioneer of the psychological benefits of gardening, Rachel Kaplan.⁴ Psychology has tended to focus instead on the potential benefits of nature, where nature is a separate, go-to location away from home. And yet, ‘gardens allow nature to enter the reality of daily life’.⁵ If nature is considered beneficial and of interest to psychology, then the apparently mundane activity of gardening is a psychological experience too. Given that so many people do garden, and that it can be hard work, the question is: What does gardening do for them? The following chapters explore whether there is a ‘psychology of gardening’, what gardening offers people and how it contributes to well-being.

Before moving on to examine why people garden, the next section gives a brief overview of the ways that research has been carried out on gardening, and considers the methods and samples used in the research.

Digging up gardening

Searching for garden research yields a long list of diverse projects. Projects explore leisure and gardening, gardening as a physical activity, gender and gardening, community and allotment gardening, gardening identities, environmental and ecological practices, the place of animals in gardens and cities, the meaning of gardens, gardens in literature and poetry, gardens as memorials, landscape and garden design, garden histories and garden visiting, to name but a few. Much of this research has something to do with psychology, because it concerns individuals and their relationship with nature. The area of psychology that directly addresses human–nature relationships is environmental psychology, and to a lesser extent the related field of ecopsychology.

Environmental psychology

Environmental psychology has a broad remit covering human–nature interaction and the investigation of the interaction between individuals and their natural and built environments. Kurt Lewin, whose work formed the basis for this area of psychology, believed strongly that behaviour is affected by the social (...