While some kids used to detest weeding, not me. I particularly liked using weeding forks, driving their spikes deep into the ground, and pulling them out again. Roots would break and dislodge with a soft snapping sound, and soil would spray out of the ground with a faint moist aroma. I was covered in dirt, sweat, and plant juices after removing every last bit of the weed and smoothing the soil back down. I also felt accomplished.
In fact, I would even describe such an encounter as therapeutic. Mental health professionals have good reason to think about the possibility that gardening, as well as creating art, which is well-known to anyone familiar with the current art therapy craze, can be a potent mental health treatment, as a new study in the scientific journal PLOS One makes clear.
What it’s like to have body dysmorphic disorder is described in the article “My face looked wrong.”
The authors elaborated on how 42 healthy female volunteers were randomly assigned to parallel gardening and art-making groups for the experiment, saying, “Engaging in both gardening and art-making activities resulted in apparent therapeutic improvements for self-reported total mood disturbance, depression symptomatology, and perceived stress with different effect sizes following eight one-hour treatment sessions.” Improvements were seen for trait anxiety indicators after gardening.
The PLOS One study obviously cannot be the last word on the subject of whether gardening is beneficial for treating mental illness because the sample size was so small. Charles L. Guy, a professor of environmental horticulture at the University of Florida and a study co-author, acknowledged as much in an email interview with Salon.
“The best evidence can be found in meta-analyses, which are studies that collect a group of related studies (typically with few participants) on a given topic and statistically combine the findings from the included studies to produce a more reliable determination of treatment outcome results,” Guy wrote to Salon. Guy cited six different meta-analyses studies from over the years that had demonstrated “that horticultural therapy, such as gardening, offers therapeutic benefits, including benefits to mental health.” He claimed that taken collectively, the studies offer proof that is “compelling, but still insufficient compared to most medical practices based on unequivocal clinical trials.”
Added he, “However, gardening has literally millions of anecdotal accounts of its alleged therapeutic effects. I assert that the therapeutic advantages of gardening are waiting to be tested and scientifically proven from the perspective of experimental medical science.”
“The idea that gardening is easy is one that many people might hold. Not at all. It is a difficult activity, and from an experimental standpoint, it is a very difficult form of therapy.”
These scientific demonstrations are being sought after by more and more scientists. Italians who used gardening as a coping mechanism for anxiety related to COVID-19 reported “lower psychopathological distress through decreased COVID-19 related distress,” according to a paper published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening last year.
More recently, researchers from several Michigan colleges conducted interviews with 28 Detroit gardeners, the majority of whom were African Americans; their findings, which were published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, were quite straightforward: “reported that gardening helped them feel better, relieved stress, was a big part of their spirituality, helped them grow as people, and gave them a chance to help others. According to these results, gardening may benefit a variety of groups’ physical and mental health.”
However, this does not imply that anyone should feel at ease simply grabbing a weeding fork and stomping on the ground.
Guy emphasized that “gardening as we provided it in our study was well planned and organized, just like horticultural therapy is a highly designed and planned treatment.” “The idea that gardening is easy is one that many people might hold. Not at all. It is a difficult activity, and from an experimental standpoint, it is a very difficult form of therapy.”
However, despite the complexity of gardening itself, human relationships with plants go back as far as our very origins.
In Guy’s words to Salon, “Throughout the course of our evolution, we were surrounded by plants that have always provided a significant portion of our nutritional needs long before agriculture, provided a place to dwell, shelter, and protection from the elements and animals that might hurt us.” “Plants are essential to our overall health and well-being, even in the modern world.”
