Cultivating Joy: The Science of Gardening and Stewardship
I once gave away a bin of compost, a red-worm wonderland I had been proud of but had to say goodbye to when moving homes unexpectedly. A friend of mine in Los Angeles ran a small catering and bed-and-breakfast experience, who had a large backyard hillside that was already sprouting wildflowers and sage brush. We tilled and dumped, and I went on my way.
A month later, I received a call from that friend. Turns out some rogue seeds found their way into my compost pile, and their yard was alive with sprawling acorn squash vines.
They cascaded down the slope like green fireworks, eventually feeding the household and their guests, and feeding us with their sheer surprise. That compost gift grew into something more than vegetables; it became a lesson in abundance, reciprocity, and joy.
Moments like these remind me that while we garden we are coaxing plants out of the soil, just as much as we are coaxing something out of ourselves. Be it kindness, patience, or that “touching-grass” level of comfort. Neuroscience is beginning to catch up with what gardeners, farmers, and foragers have known all along; tending to nature is also tending to mind, body, and community.
A gardener propagates a small handful of moss & transplants it to encourage the moss to spread.
The Brain on Soil
“As I work on the garden, the garden works on me,” wrote Canadian author and gardener, Gayla Trail. This sentiment is not merely echoed by homegardeners and plant-enthusiasts everywhere, but is also deeply rooted in science. Digging around in the dirt offers more than just a hearty exercise and an abundance of delicious herbs and fruit; soil actively supports neurological health.
Take mycobacterium vaccae, a common soil bacteria known to stimulate serotonin release, the neurotransmitter that eases depression and anxiety. In other words, dirty hands can mean a lighter mind and heart. Movement in the garden also doubles as medicine. Digging, raking, bending, and lifting count as moderate exercise, increasing blood flow to the brain and triggering dopamine and GABA, which promote pleasure and calm.
Green light makes up the largest portion of the human visible spectrum.
Even in stillness, the garden continues to tend to us. The rustle of leaves, the color of new shoots, birdsong overhead. Each of these experiences lower cortisol and usher the body into a parasympathetic state of “rest and digest” mode. Our eyes are especially tuned to green, the center of the human visible spectrum, allowing us to see more shades of it than any other color. This truth further emphasizes why green spaces are so important for our species quality of life.
Even small acts matter: harvesting vegetables or herbs releases dopamine, the brain’s natural reward signal. Over time, these little loops of joy accumulate, retraining us toward hope and motivation. Gardening, then, isn’t just a hobby: it’s embodied neuroscience, grounding our mental health in soil and sunlight.
Cultivating Self-Esteem and Kindness
A group of friends sharing fruits harvested from their garden.
Beyond neurotransmitters, gardening builds a sense of confidence that can change lives. Studies show that growing and caring for plants raises self-esteem, reduces ADHD symptoms, and lowers PTSD-related hypervigilance. For veterans, time spent in gardens and green spaces has been shown to ease long-term stress and restore balance to the nervous system. For people living with dementia, tending plants can spark memory and reduce agitation.
But perhaps the most fascinating finding is this: nature makes us kinder. Research from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center shows that exposure to awe in nature can make a profound impact. Whether through landscapes, forests, or even photos of green places, exposure to these natural spaces increases prosocial behavior. People become more generous, more willing to help others.
Working in the garden not only fosters trust and cooperation, it offers a sense of reward that can be shared with others. Whether it's offering surplus harvest to a co-worker, or a beautiful flower bed for your neighbors to enjoy from their window, it’s the type of work that keeps giving, again and again.
Two friends exchanging citrus fruits from a tree.
Beyond Productivity: Listening to the Garden
And yet, there’s a deeper conversation to be had. Western culture often approaches gardening through productivity. It prioritizes the harvest in isolation: how much yield, how many herbs, what benefits. But in many Indigenous traditions, plants are not products; they are relatives. These relatives and kin make up a complex community that is fluid with the world around us. An orchard is never completely separate from the neighboring woods or grasslands.
Decolonizing horticulture liberates us from the strict rules of monocroping and carpet-bomb pest management techniques, to consider not just our relationship to our garden, but our garden’s relationship to the world around us. We can utilize decoy crops to feed our wild neighbors and protect our precious greens, or let our Broccoli bloom and bolt to support pollinators after most other flowers have gone.This is the type of gardening that can create a resilient and thriving ecosystem within your own space. An abundant crop isn’t sterile and void of wildlife, and if done well it should naturally subdue pests you normally have to fight off.
A sprig of Mugwort about to bloom, this is an anti-inflammatory herb known for its calming effects and ability to enhance dreams and intuition.
Tomasina Chupco, Ed.D, an Indigenopathic practitioner and educator, teaches that plants have spirit, agency, and memory. In some herbal traditions, the central question isn’t “What does this plant do?” but rather: “Has this plant agreed to help me?” Consent matters, even in the plant world.
Sometimes plants “say no.” This “no” may show up in physical, mental, and spiritual communications when utilizing plant medicines. The medicine might not feel right in your body, perhaps it’s left you feeling dizzy or aching. It may spoil repeatedly, or even bring troubling dreams. These are not random events, but relational boundaries. Respecting that boundary is itself a practice of stewardship. Oftentimes, plant medicines that feel misaligned may be guiding you towards another plant that is better suited to you at the time. This type of rejection isn’t meant to shut you down to all medicinal plants, but to encourage curiosity, respect, and reflection.
This shift in perspective transforms gardening from control to collaboration. It reminds us that a respectful relationship with one plant may be more powerful than consuming twenty without intention or care.
The Secret Lives of Plants
We can begin the work of understanding plants within our own gardens by observing the ways they work and communicate together as plants.
Science is beginning to reveal just how communicative and synchronized the garden is. Plants don’t just passively grow; they sense, communicate, and collaborate in ways that can teach us a thing or two about living-well and community support.
Botanist Stefano Mancuso has shown that plants can detect gravity, electromagnetic fields, and thousands of chemical compounds utilizing them as signals and complex languages. Studies reveal that trees share resources with one another, even across species, through underground fungal networks. Some plants release chemical signals to warn neighbors of pests or drought. Flowers frequently use ultraviolet maps invisible to humans to guide pollinators directly to their nectar.
Trees synchronize electrical activity during solar eclipses.
There’s even research suggesting trees synchronize electrical activity during solar eclipses, aligning their internal rhythms with cosmic events. Whether or not plants can perceive our own electromagnetic fields (produced by our heartbeats) is still speculative, but the possibility is poetic: perhaps they’ve been sensing and syncing with us all along.
If plants are constantly in dialogue; sharing nutrients, warning each other of pests, even syncing with cosmic rhythms, then stewardship is our way of answering back, not with control, but honoring that agency.
Practical Ways to Garden with Stewardship
So how do we tend the garden while allowing it to tend us? It starts with small acts of reciprocity.
There are a number of ways we can work with plants to set them up for a fruitful and thriving life. From planting decoy and cover crops, to rotating varieties based on soil health and seasonal changes, or even pairing sister plants that support one another’s vitality.
Planting Chives to attract pollinators and repel pests. Nestling Marigolds near Tomatoes to ward off Hornworms. Allowing Parsley or Dill to bolt so Bees can feast on their flowers. Planting Milkweed to support the delicate lifecycle of Monarch Butterflies. Choosing native ground covers like Wild Strawberry or Prairie Violet to honor the ecosystems where we live.
Milkweed is integral to the Monarch Butterflies life from egg to adulthood. Caterpillars feast on their leaves which helps them become toxic to predators.
We can consider the status of a plant, is it native or displaced? There’s a responsibility in gardening to reduce harm and not let non-native or aggressive species overgrow. Biodiversity and native ecologies need our consideration, respect, and support.
Intentionality goes a long way in protecting not just our green spaces, but our communities as well. For example, in the 1940’s the USDA led a national project to plant male-only trees across the country in an attempt to avoid the “mess” from tree’s fruits and seeds. By using male-only trees, it was believed that this would effectively cut costs and streamline the planting process. This project inevitably back-fired, and led to an overabundance of pollen-producing trees increasing allergies in cities, which was somewhat corrected later with the introduction of monoecious trees (plants with both male and female parts).
Another instance where landscape architecture has left marginalized communities at a disadvantage was explored in a recent documentary film Racist Trees. This film tells the story of the Crossley Tract neighborhood in Palm Springs in the late 1950’s. The city developed a large plot of Tamarisk trees to create a towering and dense separation between the historically black neighborhood and a neighboring golf course. The trees went unmaintained for years, not only neglecting the plants but the people in an act of seemingly deliberate segregation. Activists advocated for change, leading to their removal in 2018. Learning from these historic examples is paramount in how we take accountability as gardeners and stewards of green spaces.
Stewardship requires us to recognize the layers of impact our choices carry. The way we plant, prune, and design our gardens echoes far beyond the soil line. It shapes our health, and even our histories.
If stewardship inspires us to pay attention to life, it must also invite us to acknowledge death, decay, and the transformations that follow.
Grief, Compost, and the Cycles of Care
Each garden holds the duality of beauty and nourishment alongside sorrow, dormancy, and decomposition. A grief garden is one of the many ways we can process loss and change. Compost itself is perhaps the best metaphor: what looks like waste, what feels messy and unbearable, becomes fertile ground for renewal. Steam rising from molded-coated rinds and straw is a reminder that decay is not the end, but a transformation.
An Aztec Deity, the Goddess Tlazolteotl embodies the transformative process of compost by consuming "filth" to generate new, fertile life. Source
Grief gardening is the practice of tending both loss and life at once. It’s raw and at times a little grotesque. It’s lacking the type of purity and poise of mourning in silence or the perfection of closure. Despite the strong smells and chaos of the compost heap, it holds space for a different type of awe, kindling surrender as the heat rises from the pile.
What was once sharp with rot becomes dark, rich soil, potent with life force. As grief worker Michelle Carrera explains, this quiet “beginning, disguised as decay” brings us back to honoring the cycles of return: to feed, to release, to transmute.
In this way, stewardship expands. We are not meant to simply sustain life, but to work with the knowledge that renewal requires loss. Our gardens, like our lives, are at their healthiest when they hold both abundance and absence; memory and mourning.
Growing Joy
Gardening, at its heart, is not just about plants or a green thumb. It is about kinship; with microbes and bees, with neighbors and strangers, with grief and joy alike. It is about learning to pause, to listen, to recognize that life is not linear but cyclical, composting and regenerating endlessly.
When I gave away that bin of compost, I didn’t expect acorn squash to spring up on a hillside. But the garden rarely gives us what we expect. It gives us what we need. And sometimes that is a reminder that life grows best when it is shared.
So the next time you sink your hands into soil, ask yourself: what unexpected abundance might be waiting to take root? Not only in your garden, but in you too.
