Health professionals often recommend gardening as an activity for those who experience depression and anxiety, and even heart disease, because it slows us down and puts us in touch with nature and because it grounds us in the present moment. Anecdotally we also know from gardeners that it makes them feel good. Some years ago, studies confirmed that, yes, the act of gardening itself does raise our serotonin and dopamine levels. Proof that gardening makes us happier but not really why. Now, further studies have discovered there’s a serotonin benefit of gardening that comes from something even deeper: it is in the soil itself.
Enter the nonpathenogenic bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae, in recent years shown to be released when gardeners turn their soil. Contact with the bacteria triggers the release of our brain’s ‘happy hormone’ serotonin, the effect most potent if gardening with bare hands. This beneficial bacteria is so powerful that neuroendocrinology researcher Dr Christopher Lowry is now looking at its potential as an injectable treatment to be used in fighting mental health disorders and stress-triggered illness such as autoimmune. And it might explain why so many gardeners are still actively tending their plots in their eighties and even nineties: the presence of the bacteria in the body seems to positively affect the microbiome and reduce inflammation.
One such gardener is Ray, the 96-year-old mother of village resident Chris Nobel. It’s in Chris’s garden we sit, in the curved embrace of a cascade of mixed green textures, peppered occasionally with purple flowers, that slopes up gently towards the back neighbours, as Chris tends to the edges of a rockery.
“The fact is,” she says, trowel in hand, “Mum loves her four children — but she doesn’t really need them. And her four children love her, but we don’t need her. We’re all adults and living our own lives. But her garden does need her. So it gives her the reason to get up and nurture something she loves. And she’s proud of her garden, it’s excellent exercise, and she contributes to the beauty of the world — what a wonderful thing to do!”
Strong though the anti-inflammatory benefits of M. vaccae might be, Ray Nobel gardens sitting on a milk crate to enable her to actually get up after a spell of gardening, which she does most days. From that crate, she does everything herself – with a little help now and then from Chris for some heavy work like mulching, which only seems fair since Ray will also come down from Padstow to help Chris weed and prune, filling a tarp in no time and coming back for more through the day, because it makes her feel good. It’s clear to see where Chris caught the bug.
“We all grew up with a backyard, so we had fruit trees and we had a little vegetable garden – everyone did in the 1950s. Now, they say “Oh no one’s got time to do gardening, and in suburban Padstow, they’re building huge houses and duplexes with no backyards – a little bit of grass and concrete. That’s our future?” Not only does that reduce biodiversity, because of a lack of habitat for garden creatures such as lizards, butterflies and other pollinators, Chris points out, but perhaps this trend has been a contributor to the rise in mental ill health. She’s not wrong – this is certainly what the science has been showing: modern suburbia is a place of little opportunity to connect deeply with nature or community, connections which operate as protective factors against depression.
Ellena Rebbeck and her partner Tucu d’Hiriart, also known as The Patchy Growers, are pursuing a different future, not only by leaving Sydney but by starting their own market garden out on Walkers Lane. Growing food every day, under organic and regenerative farming principles, they must be experiencing the serotonin benefit of M. vaccae and the dopamine boosts of outdoor physical exercise every day. But it’s their work. Does gardening still give them pleasure?
“Pleasure? Absolutely!” says Tucu, with a big smile, as we talk at the Kangaroo Valley Farmers Markets, where Patchy Growers have their stall every month, as well as selling through their shop on Open Food Network and at Nowra Farmers Markets in Jellybean Park (near Woolworths) on Thursdays. In fact, Tucu barely categorises the Patchy Growers gardening as work. “It’s a way of living,” he says.
“Of course, it is a business too, there’s responsibilities, and there’s jobs to be done: if we don’t plant, we don’t have food [to sell]. So sometimes you’ve got this mixed path, and it depends also on the day – you know, sometimes you’re exhausted and tired and you feel ‘Ugh, I don’t really feel to be harvesting today but I need to do it.’”
And does he feel better afterwards?
“You see the produce, and the abundance, and being in the garden, and you change, it makes a change.
“I try to see it like it’s part of my life, and I try to live it in that way: it’s not taking over and also it’s not like I’m not taking care of it. It’s part of my life, like music, or art, or community.”
Although Ellena grew up here, she’d been out of Kangaroo Valley for more than a decade before moving back with Tucu after studies, travel and work in disability advocacy. Tucu had never lived here, and they’ve found that growing and selling locally has provided them with a deep sense of community they didn’t feel in the city. “It’s the first time in ten years here that I feel like it’s home, to belong to a place,” says Tucu. “[Other places] we’ve lived, people were nice and we had good friends, but we didn’t get that sense of community; here, we feel super connected.” And that grew from their growing, starting first as employee gardeners at Kirsty Hambrook’s Terrewah Farm. Kirsty has been a great mentor to them, then and also in setting up their own business.
Ellena and Tucu have their farm on a patch of her parents’ land. Ellena’s parents are longtime gardeners and they’ve been a great help and support with their knowledge, and of course giving the pair the space to grow their produce.
The vegetable gardening takes up all the weekdays, working from a plan they establish each Monday – what needs to be harvested, what planted, what weeded – and they work through the tasks, mostly divided up, but sometimes together. They’ve worked together before, in hospitality roles, and so often they don’t even need to speak as they’re working and moving around each other, in the vegetable beds or in the processing areas and cool room. Like the farm workers described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The psychology of optimal experience, they are experiencing the pleasure and enjoyment of a flow activity. These optimal human experiences need to be repetitive, and simple enough that it’s possible to get lost in the flow of them. Like gardening.
Ellena and Tucu try to have weekends off, and that’s when Ellena will sometimes work in “the fun garden” of flowers and shrubs and nothing that has a timeframe or efficiency target pinned to it. “[But] even when I’m working in the market garden, I’m trying to get into that zone where I’m not working from stress and trying to run about and do everything […] We know that we work better when we just pick something [to focus on] and accept that we can’t do everything.”
Lessons about acceptance come up again and again in conversation with gardeners. Acceptance that plants take time to grow, and will grow, or die, as they please; you can’t control them, or the weather.
Regenerative flower grower Alison Rodway (visiting her father Bruce) also said that, for her, deadline pressure does change the pleasure derived from gardening, as much as she too tries to let go of that and be present – perfectly illustrated when she had to dash back to her farm to fill Valentine’s Day orders. For Alison, as for the Patchy Growers, this doesn’t diminish the ‘harvest high’ – the brain’s reward for all the hard work of growing and harvesting: a shot of dopamine.
When I introduce the concept, Janet Walker from the Village Green Nursery is a fan “I can totally relate to that – I mean I get a harvest high from picking a strawberry and eating it – something that’s fresh and alive; that makes a lot of sense.”
There are so many ways gardening can bring dopamine and serotonin – the happy chemicals – into the body, from having your hands in the dirt, to the joy of the work in flow, to the high of the harvest, and there’s another way too: gardening together.
Janet talks about the boys who came into the nursery as little kids with their grandma, buying veggies, long ago, and who she sees now as adults, still interested in plants, still tending a garden and popping into the nursery. She sees a lot of kids in the nursery, checking out the ornaments and following the ants and lizards.
Family gardening and family fruit-picking are excellent ways to spend quality time together and, research suggests, likely to boost your ‘tend and befriend’ hormone oxytocin – another ‘happy hormone’ that reduces fear and anxiety and increases our sense of security, particularly in relationships. But even a turn round the nursery might do it. Janet and her mum used to pop down to their local nursery when they were feeling “a bit crappy” and always felt better afterwards, even if they didn’t buy anything, and she tries to make her own nursery that sort of uplifting experience too.
“I think humans have a deep need for nature; we’ve been evolved in nature and we have a deep need for it,” she says. There is a theory that the M. vaccae bacteria is proof we’ve evolved in symbiosis with it, an interdependence ensuring reciprocal nurturing: we find gardening so pleasurable, so that we’re provoked to repeat it; the soil needs us.
Lyn Rutherford from the FIG Community Garden points this out too, as one of the benefits of gardens and gardeners: they preserve healthy, chemical free soil and seeds for the future. We do know that experiences connected to a larger sense of time, such as lying back to look at the stars, or growing trees, remind us of our insignificance in the universe and thereby make us feel better about our troubles. So tending soil and growing food in community might feed the soul as well as the belly.
Gardening also holds within it important elements humans need to feel their life has purpose and, to put it plainly, worth living: the elements of a quest. Gardeners have a plan, or perhaps just an intuition a certain idea will work, and they go about the mission of attaining that goal, which gives them not only the physical benefits of moving about, often on varied terrain, but also the neurological benefits of problem-solving and innovation, using skills and knowledge, and tools, gathered over time, to overcome the challenges brought by weather, pests and disease, and finally triumph when they earn the prize of completion. Beyond the Covid pandemic, this is why millennials might be flocking to gardening too, as an antidote to reality — instead of just to gaming, as Jane McGonigal predicted in her 2011 book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Gardening projects make easy content for sharing on social media, but I’d argue it’s this need human beings have for challenge and achievement against obstacles that keeps younger people coming back to growing. Who needs Second Life to give you joy and purpose when you have a garden? It’s also what calls gardeners to take on big projects.
A quest came to mind when Allan Gilden was talking about his garden, named ‘The Jungle’, after a garden in the Lost Gardens of Heligan, near Mevagissey in Cornwall, UK, where he saw a gully with great swathes of hydrangeas spilling into it all down the bank and was inspired. But his garden doesn’t look like that; as the drive curls around to the front of the house, flanked by tall, dark green walls broken by dramatic spiky specimens bursting out of sculptural pots, it brings to mind a film called The Assam Garden that I saw long ago. As we talk at the table, a rich and varied canopy stretching the full expanse of the glass doors, beyond the pool that’s been transformed into a frog pond, a certain phrase comes up several times: “It’s not the garden I set out to make.” It seems the garden has called itself into being, evolving from what was already here to a series of garden areas joined by snaking grassy paths, each one a different mood. Allan uses a ‘cut and drop’ method of pruning and tidying, where all prunings and weeds stay on the garden, building soil – a method he’s used since his first garden on a sloping block in Hardy’s Bay. It’s a garden teeming with life, from frogs to birds, to spiders, to the tall swaying canopy and rustling leaves of cannas and crinums as some lizard passes through. For Allan a garden means freedom and the joy to plant and shape it for himself and, though it is a monument to daily hard work, he gets a great deal of pleasure from it. “I find it quite daunting the jobs I’ve got to do every day […] but when I get out there I just don’t want to come in because I really enjoy it.”
