Gardening: a positive force in times of uncertainty and hardship

Gardening has been my passion for more than three decades.  I enjoy being outdoors planting, watching the plants grow, and monitoring the changing plant communities through the seasons. Over the past twenty years I have created and maintained a four-acre garden in Bremerton, Washington. I joyfully open this botanical oasis to the public for tours and workshops on a variety of horticulture topics. This garden is not only a sanctuary for plants and wildlife, but it also serves as a laboratory in which I experiment with sustainable landscaping best practices.  It’s spring, and I am excited about going outdoors and seeing the garden awaken with all the new buds busting forth, new leaves unfolding, and the myriad of bulbs and flowers blooming. I marvel at the kaleidoscope of colors put on by the flowering cherries, currants, evergreen clematis, star magnolia, and a variety of heaths. The food and shelter provided by the diversity of plants attract an array of birds—the striking Northern Flicker and Red-breasted Sapsucker, the buzzing Anna’s and Rufous Hummingbirds driving off feeder competition, and the Song Sparrow belting out its intricate song atop the sourwood.  Now it’s time for me to divide and plant the summer and fall perennials, prepare the raised beds, start the veggie garden, prune out any broken or damaged branches of woody plants, and after weeding, add a fresh layer of mulch to the soil. I enjoy the meditative task of eliminating the lasts patches of spring weeds before they get established or set seed.

When my wife recently came home from a trip to the East Coast with a bad “cold”, the fear of COVID-19 really struck home. Home-bound, like many of us, I worried about her and missed the freedom to be with my family, friends, and the public. As both an author of books on sustainable gardening and medical researcher, I know well the vital role gardens play in greening our urban spaces and buoying human health and well-being, especially in times of uncertainty. As I hunker down at home, I find the garden a sanctuary that provides me solace and energizing respite from the strain of social isolation and disruption of my daily routine.

Our gardens soothe and rejuvenate us, taking our minds off our troubles and strengthening us for life’s challenges, new and old. Gardening connects us with the rhythms, sights, sounds, and oh yes, the smells of nature. Our gardens provide us with a personalized oasis within which we can relax and enjoy the wonders and beauty of nature. But they are more than just a personal oasis, they are an essential link to the broader ecosystem.

Feeling stressed? Tending to plants, working the soil, breathing in the fresh air as you plant and weed and putter—all can alleviate the chronic stress caused by constant news updates about threat of the COVID-19 virus and the immense disruption it is bringing to our daily lives. Fresh air and welcome fun-filled physical activity in the garden are our friends in times like this. Think of the many ways they can help keep us grounded, reduce our anxiety, and restore our physical and mental well-being. Working in the garden is a perfect sort of social distancing. It is an ideal way to create friendly homes and havens for songbirds, pollinators and crawly things. And the colanders full of fresh fruit and vegetables that will be our labor’s result will help feed and sustain us, nourishing both our bodies and that aesthetic need to create beauty in the face of chaos.

Gardens also offer an important antidote to human-caused threats to our earth that predate this new virus: urban development, careless land use, invasive species, and climate change—all working together to create an existential crisis facing world populations. We know that climate changes are accelerating largely due to us, our continued use of fossil fuels to heat our homes, power our industries, fuel our automobiles and speed us through the air to our vacations in faraway places. We continue to release greater and greater amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One result of this is the substantial alteration of a healthy, sustainable distribution and composition of plant and animal species. Gardens can play an important role in alleviating these strains on the environment. Now, more than ever, we need to do what we can, garden by garden, to restore nature to our cities, creating and connecting sustainable oases that can endure over time without excessive watering, fertilizing, costs and maintenance. Sustainable urban gardens are resilient, adaptable, balancing nature’s needs and our human needs, now and into the future. I am encouraged by the power of sustainable gardens, created and maintained using sustainable gardening best practices, to help mitigate climate change.

Gardens can restore habitat, heal the damage to the land, purify the air and water, and detoxify environmental pollutants, and help mitigate climate change. Our garden’s trees, shrubs, and groundcovers offer food, shelter, and nesting sites for city-dwelling birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles as well as pollinators, and their lively presence enliven our lives.

Trees block solar radiation from the ground, pavement and buildings, lowering the temperature of the ambient air, soils and impervious surfaces. Not only does this directly cool our urban community, it also reduces the need for air conditioning and fans and the factories required to produce them and the delivery trucks to transport them. This, in turn, reduces ozone-forming chemicals that trap other harmful compounds in the atmosphere in the well-known cycle that raises heat and impairs air quality and visibility.

Gardens also cool the air through transpiration, evaporation through the leaves of plants. Plants take up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, converting it into oxygen which we need to breathe and sugars which they store in fruits, seeds and plant tissue, making woody plants the largest carbon storage place on land.  Plants, especially trees, absorb air pollutants: carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides, as well as small airborne particles that pollute our skies and foul our lungs. Trees and other vegetation intercept rainfall, moderate storm flows, and absorb water-based pollutants that degrade our water quality and aquatic habitats.  Plants minimize soil erosion, particularly on slopes, anchoring soil with their roots, reducing soil compaction, enhancing water infiltration and lessening flood danger.

The coming of spring and our passing from one season into the next is a perfect reminder that we are in the early grip of a serious pandemic that will inevitably change us, our communities, and our larger society. But it will pass if only we will rise to the occasion, pulling together as a community and nation. The symbiotic nature of the healthy plant communities of our gardens can serve as a metaphor for us, enabling us to participate as members of healthy urban communities that take care of one another. It is so important right now to be good neighbors, to help one another.

Together we can all get through this difficult period. Channel your fears and anxiety about COVID-19 into action by getting out and working in the garden and exploring the wonders of nature as spring, and then summer, bring forth all their beauty. Each of us can participate in restoring our natural systems by caring for the land we live upon, preserving natural resources, reducing waste and using less fossil fuel. Dig your hands into the earth and hear what it is trying to tell us.  We can heal the earth and it can heal us.

-John Albers