“How long will you be out there?” my husband called to me from the porch nearly every night last summer.
“Just a little bit longer,” I replied from the garden, where I’d lost all track of time.
Just a few more snips, I told myself.
Ten minutes later, I heard my husband’s voice again.
At first glance, gardening seems like a superfluous activity, a hobby for the leisure class with disposable income and concern for what their neighbors think of their lawn. But like the roots of a plant, the beauty of gardening goes much deeper:
As we work to improve our gardens, the act of gardening improves our mental and physical health – especially if our brains are wired differently.
My gardening hobby began innocently enough, with simple beautification: a couple hydrangeas under the front window, a handful of hostas in the backyard, a bunch of daffodils by the mailbox.
As time went on, I had more children, and life got busier – but my gardening habit only grew. By the time the pandemic hit and my third child entered the world, it had reached what some might call obsession: bags of mushroom compost piled high, books on native planting covering my nightstand, every corner of my yard transformed into another flower bed.
I had also reached the height of my lifelong struggle with anxiety – with a healthy dose of depression on top of it. At the gentle nudging of my husband, I returned to therapy, and after a year of grappling with why my life felt so unmanageable, I found the answer I didn’t know I’d been looking for: ADHD.
As I looked at my life through the lens of neurodivergence and noticed everything that was out of my control, I turned to gardening for relief. What began as an innocent hobby slowly shifted into a form of therapy.
When the pile of dishes in the sink felt too overwhelming, I could pull weeds in the flower garden. When I couldn’t come up with a final paragraph for an article, I could pluck bright, juicy grape tomatoes I had nurtured from seedling to harvest.
According to research, there are good reasons I was drawn to gardening: spending time in the garden provides a range of benefits beyond the simple joy of the harvest. Studies have shown that certain microbes in soil may increase serotonin when they touch our skin. The sunlight we get while gardening helps our bodies produce much-needed vitamin D and can improve mood and sleep. All that digging and pruning also provides the moderate, functional exercise doctors recommend for optimal physical and mental health.
For neurodivergents, gardening can be virtually therapeutic, a combination of benefits that, if distilled into pill form, might be the bestselling drug on the market. ADHD is linked to deficits in serotonin and vitamin D, which gardening naturally boosts, and the exercise involved can reduce both hyperactivity and impulsivity.
Gardening can also be cognitively restorative, replenishing precious attentional resources depleted by everyday responsibilities. Neurodivergent brains favor interest-based attention, and most of the attention demanded by modern life is inherently boring: spreadsheets, emails, checklists.
Nature, on the other hand, allows for the free-flowing, involuntary attention the neurodivergent brain craves. Our focus, often scattered, can land on the tiniest detail that the focused mind would miss, awakening the senses to the hidden beauty in our surroundings.
The rainbow of colors the natural world can produce when properly coaxed is dizzying. But the beauty is deeper than the towering yellow sunflowers and the deep reddish-green jalapenos.
When we can slow down, be fully in our bodies, and immerse ourselves in a task like gardening, our delicate senses are primed to take in the sound of the birds coming to pilfer our flower seeds, the smell of a blooming gardenia, the feel of the cool soil as we dig, the sense of accomplishment as we partake in creation.
The beauty unique to gardening is the promise that if we simply tend to this tiny bit of life as it grows, it will reliably become something stunning.
It’s the nurturing, the tending, and that care that leads to the beauty being created. And for the neurodivergent brain, the most beautiful aspect of gardening is how much it can give back to us.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that my interest in gardening grew as my life became more chaotic. As the pandemic raged, I dug out new beds. In the anxiety-ridden newborn days, I learned how to separate one hosta into 2. And as I wrestled with the implications of my new ADHD diagnosis, my focus sharpened down to the literal seeds of gardening, saving these tiny promises of new life from dried blooms and germinating them in my laundry room.
The beauty of my garden deepened when I realized that my brain, which uniquely struggles to sustain attention in today’s world, was literally made to benefit from gardening. By offering a peaceful, engaging, sensory-rich environment for my mind to explore, the humble garden restores the attention deficit created by the strain of daily to-dos. Dopamine fires as I notice pollinators float from one colorful zinnia to the next. My breath slows as I kneel in the dirt to check for new growth. Disparate ideas connect as my thoughts amble. The scent of a peony offers a quick burst of energy.
Before, I might have called gardening my escape, a simple hobby I picked up to avoid the list of tasks piling up inside the house.
Now, I see it for what it really is: my brain’s clever way of soothing itself, regulating my nervous system, and restoring the attention I’ve exhausted throughout the day.
The ultimate beauty I’ve found in gardening is that as I’ve tended to my garden, it has returned the favor by tending to me.
Even when my husband is calling me inside.
Bio: Wesley Gallagher is a freelance writer and editor with expertise in mental and behavioral health. She writes about life with ADHD on her Substack, Body Double.
