A Gardener’s Emotional Toolbox
Why we get hooked, and why that’s a very good thing.
Cecilija Rubenis, 19th Feb 2025
Roadside Ammonium alatum near Braidwood NSW providing naturalistic planting inspiration.
The beginnings of a green-thumbed life are barely detectable. It’s a backyard climbing tree, a beloved patch of local bushland, or maybe a dramatic teenage friendship with the strange cactus on your windowsill (a gift from your mum, probably). However, within a few short years of taking a vague interest in plants you look up from your stupor – pausing the very real conversation you were just having with your kiwi vines – and realise that all the furniture has been rearranged to face the garden, and it must have been you who did it, at some point. You try to put your cup of tea down to take it all in, but you can’t, because every surface is covered in plant-matter or books pertaining to plant-matter. So why do we get so hooked?
A summer harvest of cucumbers, zucchinis, peppers, tomatoes, sunflowers and salvias taking up allllllll the bench space.
Gardening is both an art and a science. It takes creativity and intuition to compose a garden that is not only beautiful but is a pleasant and restful space, but all the creativity in the world can’t guarantee you success with your soils and plants. For this, you need science – biology, ecology, agronomy, hydrology. You need to understand climate and microclimates. You need knowledge of the site, rainfall, frost, winds. You need excellent skills of observation to assist you in identifying and overcoming problems, and to reinforce what is working well.
Xerochrysum viscosum and Brachyscome ‘Pacific Cloud’ tangling nicely in the garden.
In fact, it’s even more than art and science, it’s also a lesson in mental and emotional resilience. You need discipline (tiny seedlings can’t water themselves), and you need the presence of mind to be able to slow down enough to put your observational skills to good use. You need patience – or at least, you’re forced to become patient as you realise that no matter how much you long for your trees to be a bit taller, you’re still in the depths of winter and there’s nothing you can do to hurry it all along. Gardening is, after all, the ultimate long game; within our amazingly short human lifespan, we are unlikely to see the prime of many of the trees that we plant.
You need curiosity – it allows you to spend the time watching interactions between the creatures in your garden, and you inevitably discover something you didn’t know yesterday. You need stoicism to get you back out into the garden, even though a late frost did a number on your new vegetable seedlings (painstakingly raised from seed and nursed and potted on and on), and you need to be able to forgive yourself when you forget to net the next batch and the resident possum eats the lot.
Paying my Dad in sunflowers for help around the house - before the rosellas munched them all.
It's more than art, science, and character-building – there’s also the undeniable fact that gardens are good for people, and people congregate around them. Gardeners attract other gardeners, and thank goodness we do, because we need each other. There’s the relief that is felt when you can freely and at length discuss your plans to extend your composting system, and the sense of community that comes from the realisation that you aren’t even on a soapbox, you’re preaching to the choir and these people are really invested in what you have to say, just as you can’t wait to hear about their projects, successes, and struggles. We need each other for advice, for local knowledge, for commiserations and condolences, for seed-swapping and nursery-hopping, and for invaluable information as we learn to adapt in the face of the climate crisis.
Even more exciting than attracting a gardener to your garden? Attracting a non-gardener. The prospect of enchanting a non-gardener with your garden is thrilling – very occasionally, you will see a look of bewilderment turning into something else as their eyes light up and a world of possibility opens. Just maybe, that non-gardener will become a gardener, and begin to tend their own little patch of earth.
My husband Aidan and my best friend Em sharing a cuppa and planting out lettuces. Both once non-gardens, now passionate gardeners.
I think gardens and gardening hooks you for this reason – gardens have the uncanny ability to exponentially expand your world. Once you start learning about local species, a walk in the bush is infinitely richer. Once you start learning about soils and geology, landscapes on long car-rides start to tell a story of their own. It’s hard to feel lonely when your garden is humming with insect life, and impossible to feel bored when you’re spending a quiet moment watching native grasses catch the breeze at the end of a long day. Gardening may begin by connecting us to the plants on our windowsills or in our backyards, but it inevitably ends up connecting us to local wildlife, soils, landscapes, ecosystems, and community. It connects us to the past, as we become part of the ancient tradition of humans tending to and caring for the natural world. This is particularly evident in the world’s oldest continuous culture – First Nations Australians have cared for this country for at least 60, 000 years through complex and regenerative land management practices. As Margo Neale writes in her introduction to Plants: Past, Present and Future, “Country is not only the heartbeat of this continent but also our heartbeat. It tells us who we are, how we should live, how to care for each other and care for Country. It holds the answer to our future survival on this planet. Plants are not only part of Country – in our worldview they are Country.” With so much adversity to be faced going forward, looking to the past and honouring these instinctual human behaviours of connection and care are surely where hope for the future can begin, as we nurture and plant and tend not only for ourselves, but for generations of humans and other living things who will come long after we are gone.
Native bluebells (Wahlenbergia sp.) forming a sea of purple in my garden. They are loved by local insects, including tiny native bees who can occasionally be spotted sleeping inside the blossoms.
Many of the joys in my life are owed to the fact that my thumbs turned green - whether it’s spending time with friends and neighbours sharing in a summer vegetable glut, the thrill of spotting a favourite plant in its natural habitat on a bush walk, or having a front row seat to watch hovering Eastern Spinebills quietly feasting on nectar in our garden. So, thank you Mum for the cactus – it seems that houseplants really are the gateway drug to a world full of hope and possibility.
