Gardening as Therapy

Willard Scott on the Today show recently featured a couple, married happily for seventy-five years. The secret of their longevity? Never fight, but when it gets a bit tense on the home front, the husband goes out and gardens. They have the biggest garden on the block.

I laughed but gardening as therapy make an awful lot of sense. I tell friends that, for me, the grittier tasks like weeding and deadheading have all the satisfaction of cleaning the bathroom but none of the drawbacks. A guy is outside in the fresh air. It is obvious that something tangible has been accomplished. Life doesn’t get any better.

Gardeners love to talk about the “deeper meaning” of their favorite past-time. Google just about any topic and there are web sites devoted to quotes about what getting out there in the dirt does to the human psyche. For starters, note the language—gardening “grounds” us.

That annual Fall garden clean-up, a very tough and potentially nasty chore? Poetically among gardeners, the process is known as “putting the garden to bed”. I can’t imagine a kinder, gentler way of describing that bittersweet moment when we realize it’s time to call it quits for the season, get out shears and clippers and getting rid of the greenery that if left behind, can rot the garden at its root. The tough task behind us, visions of “long winter naps” and the promise of Spring’s “awakening” are not far behind.

Then there’s my personal favorite job and expression, “deadheading”. Wow. It took some imagination to come up with whimsical term for the lowly but important task of snipping away the bloomed-out and unsightly. Deadheading speaks of life-changing transitions, not blisters and broken finger nails. Deadheading is not about death or loss but about revitalization.
According to the “Ask Oxford” online dictionary, the word ‘garden’ itself stems from 14th century Northern French gardin, a variation of Old French jardin (still used in modern French). Its roots may be even older in the early Germanic languages.
The word ‘yard’, though, is one of the oldest words in the English language, in use since 300 AD. The Oxford online search says its origin is the Germanic word geard ‘building, home, region’ which also has ties to ‘gardens’ and ‘orchards’. A whole family of words related to ‘enclosures’ and secure spaces have similar endings, including city names as far away as the Russian Novgorod and Petrograd.
I like that whole notion. Even with all those shears and other sharp objects lying around, even fighting deer and numerous flying and creeping predators, gardens in word can be wonderful places of safety and shelter for gardeners and plants alike.