What Gardening Does for You

What are the benefits of gardening? It’s exercise, it’s fresh air, it gets us away from screens and gives us something think about (like, I wonder if that echinacea is really gone or if it will be back next year?). But is it more than “just a hobby”?

Researchers have looked at gardening to determine its benefits. They’ve measured energy expenditure, cortisol, diet, mental health, dementia risk, social connection and even what happens to biodiversity when thousands of individually managed gardens are considered together. Here are a few things they’ve found.

1. Gardening really does count as exercise

Researchers have measured the oxygen consumption of people while they garden and found that many common gardening activities reach moderate intensity. In one study of adults over 65, making a vegetable bed and maintaining a garden fell into the same broad moderate intensity category as walking.

The intensity obviously depends on the job. Deadheading petunias is not the same proposition as digging out a mature lilac. But gardening has one advantage over exercise done purely for exercise: you can accidentally keep doing it for a very long time because there is always one more thing that needs doing. And you get flowers!

2. Gardening can help you come down from stress

It really does. Researchers in the Netherlands gave 30 gardeners a stressful task and then randomly assigned them to spend 30 minutes either gardening outdoors or reading indoors. They measured cortisol in subjects’ saliva, a hormone used as a physiological indicator of stress.

Cortisol fell in both groups, as you’d expect once the stressful task was over. But it fell significantly more in the gardening group. Positive mood also recovered completely among the gardeners, while it deteriorated further among the readers.

Apparently, sometimes the appropriate response to a difficult day really is to go outside and weed something.

3. The mental health evidence goes well beyond one experiment

A meta-analysis combined 22 studies involving 76 comparisons between gardeners and control groups.

Across the studies, gardening was associated with better outcomes in areas including depression, anxiety, life satisfaction and quality of life. The researchers found evidence of publication bias, meaning studies showing positive results may have been more likely to make it into the scientific literature. Importantly, however, the overall positive effect remained after the researchers adjusted statistically for that bias.

If not a complete treatment for depression or anxiety, that familiar feeling that an afternoon in the garden has done you good has some research behind it.

4. Growing vegetables can change how you eat

Researchers recruited people from community garden waiting lists who had not gardened for at least two years. They then randomly assigned half to receive a garden plot and half to remain on the waiting list without gardening.

The new gardeners increased their fibre intake and their moderate to vigorous physical activity. A later analysis of the same trial also found that, during the growing season, the gardeners increased their vegetable intake by about 0.63 servings a day compared with the control group.

Growing food, it seems, may affect what you eat.

5. Gardening has been linked to a lower risk of dementia

Australian researchers followed 2,805 people aged 60 and older for 16 years. All were free of cognitive impairment when the study began. During the follow up period, daily gardening was associated with a 36 percent lower risk of dementia.

Gardening also happens to combine several activities associated with healthy ageing, including physical activity, planning, learning, sensory stimulation and constant problem solving.

6. Gardens can grow social connections too

A garden can be a solitary refuge, but gardening also gives people a remarkably easy reason to talk to one another. A study of 332 people in Tokyo compared allotment gardeners with non-gardeners. After accounting for demographic and lifestyle differences, gardeners reported better mental health, better perceived general health and greater social cohesion; essentially, they had the sense that they were connected with the community around them.

This particular study shows an association rather than proving that gardening caused the difference. But community and allotment gardens create something private gardens don’t always provide: repeated encounters with people who already have something in common.

And if conversation fails, you can always talk about how to use up all your zucchini.

7. Your garden can be habitat

The ecological importance of residential gardens is easy to underestimate because we tend to think of them one at a time.

A major 2023 review examined 408 scientific papers on biodiversity in residential gardens. Researchers found that gardens can support substantial biodiversity, particularly when they contain greater vegetation cover and more complex habitat.

Trees, shrubs, flowers, lawns, dead plant material, vegetable beds and other features create different conditions for different organisms. A garden containing several layers and kinds of vegetation is quite a different habitat from a rectangle of closely mown turf.

8. A slightly untidy garden can be doing useful work

Here’s some excellent news for anyone who didn’t quite get around to everything this weekend.

The same review found a recurring association between intensive garden management and reduced biodiversity. Frequent mowing and the use of pesticides and fertilizers were among the practices that were often associated with lower biodiversity, although the results varied among studies and the authors noted that experimental evidence for many recommended wildlife gardening practices remains surprisingly limited.

Your failure to achieve botanical military precision may have ecological merit after all.

9. Your garden isn’t really an island

Chickadees, squirrels, butterflies, bats and cottontails don’t know or care where your property line is.

The residential biodiversity review found evidence that connections among gardens, and between gardens and other green spaces, matter for the movement of species through developed areas.

That changes the way we can think about an individual garden. It doesn’t have to provide everything. A tree in one yard, flowering plants in another, a shrub thicket farther down the street and a park nearby can form pieces of a larger landscape.

The ecological value of a garden, in other words, isn’t confined to the fence.

10. What gardeners know counts

This may be the neatest thing of all.

Residential gardens are unusual ecosystems because humans make an extraordinary number of decisions about them. We decide what grows, what gets pulled out, what gets watered, whether a lawn is mown, whether an insect gets sprayed and whether a particular caterpillar is allowed to finish eating a leaf.

The 2023 biodiversity review found that the characteristics and management of gardens are related to the biodiversity they support. It also found that individual gardens collectively make up an important component of urban green infrastructure.

That means gardening knowledge matters beyond producing prettier gardens and better-tasting food.

Millions of small decisions add up.