I don’t know what it is about a garden that has always drawn humans to them. But they’ve always been very popular, and an intrinsic part of peoples’ lifestyles. Most religions feature gardens as the settings for quite a few of the largest events According to Christianity, humanity was started in a garden and the son of God was resurrected in a garden. The Buddhist build gardens to allow nature to permeate their surroundings. Almost every major palace and government building has a garden. But what’s so good about them? They’re just a crowd of plants, when all said and done.
Naturally, the reasoning is fairly obvious behind why people grow food in gardens. It’s to eat! If you live off the fat of the land and actually survive on stuff from your garden, it’s simple to understand the reasoning. But I’m considering those individuals who plant flower gardens just in as much as looking nice. There’s no immediate benefit that I can watch; you just have a bunch of flowers in your yard! Still, after thinking extensively about the motivation behind planting decorative gardens, I’ve conceived several potential theories.
I think one good reason people love gardens so much is although we have a natural hope to progress and industrialize, deep within all of us is a primal love for nature. While this wish might not be as effective as the desire for modernism, it is still sufficiently strong to compel us to manufacture gardens, small outlets of nature, amid all our hustle and bustle. Since being in nature is like regressing to an earlier stage of humanity, we too can regress to a period of comfort and utter happiness. This is the reason why gardens are so relaxing and calming to be in. This is the reason why gardens are a fine place to meditate and do tai chi workouts. A garden is a method to quickly escape from the busy world.
I’ve thought every now and then that perhaps we as humans feel a kind of guilt driving us to bring back nature and care for it. This guilt could stem from the knowledge that we, not personally but as a race, have destroyed so much of nature to get where we’re today. It’s the least we can achieve to create a small garden in remembrance of all the trees we kill every day. It’s my theory that this is the contributing factor for most people to need gardening as an interest.
Gardening is definitely a nutritious trait though, don’t get me wrong. Any hobby that provides physical exercise, helps the surroundings, and improves your diet can’t be a negative thing. So regardless of what the underlying psychological cause for gardening is, I consider that everyone should carry on do so. In America especially, which is treating excess weight and pollution as its two major problems, I think gardening can simply serve to improve the state of the world.
Of course I’m no psychologist; I’m just a curious gardener. I often stay up for hours questioning what makes me garden. What is it that makes me go outside for a couple of hours each day with my gardening tools, and facilitate the small-time growth of plants that would grow naturally by themselves? I might never know, but in this case ignorance truly is bliss.
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This post was written by admin on July 5, 2010
