Is Gardening Just Outdoor Housework?

Welcome to my new series, ‘Garden Therapy’. My name is Dr Grace Alexander. I am a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and an organic gardener. Through Garden Therapy, I unpack our relationship with gardens and gardening.

This is the third of three introductory articles in this series in which we will explore some of the foundations of how psychological ideas can change how we think and feel about plants and growing, beauty and horticultural happiness.

Here, I'm talking about what gets in the way of gardening being a source of joy.

Tell me it's not just me?

I have been known to throw a dinner party purely to motivate myself to clean the bathroom. This is not laziness. I want to be very clear about that. It is a problem of process.

I don't actually mind the hoovering. What I mind is having to locate the hoover, establish that it has a clean bag, unplug the head attachment on account of the dogs, find the other one, and then discover that it still doesn't work very well, at which point I am mentally ordering a skip and planning simply to paint the floorboards in a moody shade of gloss paint.

The outcome, a house so clean that anyone could arrive unannounced and be welcomed straight in, is genuinely desirable to me. The process of getting there is, on too many days, just another demand on a cognitive system that is already running rather hot.

The reason I'm telling you this in what is supposed to be an essay about gardening is that people are relentlessly evangelical about the mental health benefits of gardening, and yet the discourse sounds quite different when it's about sowing sweet peas versus scrubbing floors. I've been trying to work out why.

The Muhammad Ali Problem

Muhammad Ali said he hated training but loved being a boxer. I think about this quite a lot in the garden.

I love having a beautiful garden. This is more important to me than almost anything else. When I say beautiful, I mean safety and refuge and prospect and a place that is fully in my own style. It matters at a level I would call profound and probably embarrassing. And yet I frequently find myself not gardening.

The sun is out. The garden is right there. And I am inside, setting up a new business or redesigning a website or writing this essay.

The barrier, I have come to understand, is not motivation, or even, god forbid, that I am undisciplined. It is executive functioning. And executive functioning is, basically, maths.

Gardening places enormous demands on the brain's capacity for planning and sequencing and decision-making, before you have so much as touched a plant.

First I need to find my loppers. They are either in the studio (which is sort of a studio and not a shed, because I don't have a shed) or in the greenhouse, which is slightly damp and therefore also not quite a shed.

My hori hori knife is simply gone. There is an Instagram meme at the moment in which someone carefully sets down their secateurs and the accompanying sound is You'll Never See Me Again.

That is my life.

I am not averse to the gardening. I am averse to the shenanigans that precede it.

When the process defeats the purpose

Here is what is true: once you are actually in the garden, the evidence for its benefits is compelling. Mycobacterium vaccae, the bacterium found in soil, acts as a natural antidepressant. Being outside, getting sun on your skin, engaging with living things, working with your hands. The case is good and I believe it entirely.

And yet if simply being in the garden reliably made us feel better, we would all be out there rather than on our sofas doom-scrolling or shopping for seeds online. I enjoy shopping for seeds considerably more than sowing them. I think quite a lot of people do.

The dominant narrative around gardens and mental health goes like this: gardens are therapeutic, nature is healing, get outside. It isn't wrong. But I think it's incomplete. And that incompleteness does a specific kind of damage to a specific kind of person, the one who knows they should be in the garden, wants to be in the garden, and keeps not quite managing to get there. Who then adds this to the already substantial pile of things they are doing wrong.

When I am feeling battered by life, I do not always find gardening restorative. Sometimes I find it another thing that requires something of me when I have very little left. It is a bit messy. It involves decision-making. It requires physical energy that is (and I think this matters, and doesn't get talked about nearly enough) simply not available to everyone.

If your executive function is depleted or your body is in pain, you experience chronic illness, or the weight of recent events is considerable, the garden can feel less like a sanctuary and more like a reproach.

The supermodel problem

I wrote in my first book, Grow and Gather, that comparing yourself to the gardens you are most exposed to is a specific kind of cruelty. National Trust gardens. Gardens Illustrated. The perfectly curated Instagram account. These are, to use my own analogy, supermodels. Treating them as an aspirational benchmark for your Tuesday evening after work is roughly as rational as planning to walk a catwalk during Paris Fashion Week.

Social media has made this considerably worse. However, a photographer who shall remain nameless for reasons that will become obvious, once said that while photographing some of these extraordinary gardens, you wouldn't have wanted to make a cup of tea in the kitchens. That is, the gardens beautiful enough to be photographed may be produced by a kind of obsessional focus that simply doesn't leave room for kitchens. Or much else.

There is also something worth saying about tidiness. Alys Fowler has written about how the pressure towards tidiness in gardens has historically been a way of occupying women with labour, rather than beauty. As soon as washing machines and the like freed us from some of the more time-consuming work indoors, the pressure to keep the outdoors manicured suddenly arrived.

As I write this, my house is covered in compost because it is seed-sowing season. I experience this as a mild, persistent, disproportionate shame that I find very hard to shift, despite the fact that my windowsills are covered in the healthiest of seedlings.

And the really striking thing is that the evidence that tidiness actively damages garden biodiversity is now overwhelming. We are destroying habitats because we are anxious about what our neighbours think of our borders. This is a complex, emotionally nuanced, deeply socialised issue. It deserves more than a cheerful post about the therapeutic benefits of dead-heading.

Housework, or something better?

So. Is gardening just outdoor housework?

On some days and in some moods, yes. It is repetitive and it is never finished and it involves a great deal of locating things you put down somewhere and now cannot find. The cognitive load of it is higher than the cheerful narrative around garden therapy tends to acknowledge. If you are already depleted, it can deplete you further.

But I think there is something genuinely different on offer, if we can reach it.

Housework is adversarial. It is you against entropy. The house wants to be dirty and you are holding the line. There is no collaboration, no sense that the house has views on the matter. You impose order and the house quietly, cheerfully undoes it just by virtue of you living in it.

A garden is not like this. Or at least, it doesn't have to be. A garden is a relationship. It is a partnership with processes that were underway long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave. You are not creating beauty so much as curating it, working with a living system that has its own intelligence, its own preferences, its own ideas about what it wants to become.

When I think about my garden as a house I have to keep clean, it becomes a source of guilt. When I think about it as a relationship, one that requires presence and attention but not perfection, not the total subjugation of the garden's character to my own agenda, it becomes something else. Something that can, on the right day, actually restore rather than deplete.

Insight without action, as I tell my therapy clients, can be worse than no insight at all. So: the action is small. It might just be naming the thing. That sometimes gardening feels hard not because you are lazy or insufficiently in touch with nature, but because the process is genuinely demanding and the outcomes you have been shown to want are genuinely unattainable. That is not a personal failing. That is an accurate description of the situation.

Once you have named it, you might notice what happens when you go outside not to achieve the garden, but simply to be in it. Without your loppers. Without an agenda. Just to look at what is already there.

That is not housework; that is something else entirely. This is pottering.

I will be on it as soon as I have made a cup of tea and found the biscuits.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Some people will not relate at all, and that's fine. They probably have immaculate houses too. But if you want to join me in a more reflective and thoughtful corner, I'm here for you.