Grow a Garden for Your Emotional Wellbeing

My personal experience of successfully managing grief through gardening.

Kale, dandelion, wood sorrel and thyme from my garden. — Photo by Patti Wren Byrd

We all know the benefits of growing your own garden for the best and freshest veggies and herbs. But do you know the wonderful mental and emotional health benefits of growing and maintaining a garden? It’s true; therapy comes in all ways, shapes and colors and some of the purest therapy sessions look like dirt under your nails after a morning, afternoon or evening spent outside in the fresh air and sunshine.

I’ve always dreamed of growing my own garden. I was the kid at the North Carolina State Fair that only endured zigzagging through the deafeningly loud and overwhelming midway with my family to be able to spend some quiet, calm time in the gardens that were so creatively cultivated. As a young adult, I moved in with a house full of green-thumbs who one day decided to turn our entire front yard on the main drag of The Plaza in Noda of Charlotte, NC into an incredibly bountiful garden. Needless to say, our radical idea got a lot of attention, landing our garden in the local paper and spurring on a small movement of lovely front yard gardens in the neighborhood. I remember coming home after long, demanding days working as a barista and stopping in our garden on my way into our little inner-city bungalow. In the garden, I could breathe. My stress dissipated as I’d pick ripe cherry tomatoes off the sprawling fragrant vines, wrap each one in a neighboring basil leaf and pop the mouthwatering combo into my mouth. I forgot about the chaotic work day I’d left behind at the coffee shop and with each burst of almost citrisy little tomatoes, my mood started to life and I’d begin to feel happy. For no reason. (Or so it seemed.) I snacked to my heart’s content as I strolled down the rows of raised garden beds, admiring each new growth from the day before; My favorite was watching the eggplants and cucumbers grow from tiny little miniature things into the almost the exaggerated, rotund fruits that they ballooned into. I couldn’t help but notice how a little moment in the garden affected the rest of my day so much. It was like washing my slate clean, so to speak.

My cherry tomatoes and basil in the garden — Photo by Patti Wren Byrd

Fast forward almost a decade and a half and I found myself in a breathtakingly gorgeous mountain valley in Western North Carolina, very alone, and in an all but crippling state of grief, struggling to manage the loss of a loved one. Day in and day out, I felt paralyzed by the pain I was grappling with. Nothing seemed to help redirect my mind. Springtime finally came around and I remember standing in my lonely little house, looking out into my desolate little garden; grey, brittle skeletons of kale and endless dried arugula leaned sadly against my chicken-wire fence, mixing in with the dead bushes of once green and fiery orange marigolds, and giant tangles of grey, broken and deflated tomato plants. Nothing about this pitiful site lifted my spirits. I remember thinking to myself, “Well. I guess I better get out there and get my spring garden going.”

I put on my scarf and jacket and got to work. Working through a swirling lens of tears, I cleared out all the dead remnants of the last season and hauled it all to the compost pile, taking moments to look around me at the stunning long range views down the valley, to green pastured mountainsides, gracefully glowing in the golden haze of the evening sun. My garden now was a clean slate once again; Nothing but a wide open space, fertile with the multitude of seeds from the previous year’s plants that I’d just cleared out. I set out to the West Asheville Tailgate Market the following week to pay my annual, pre-garden visit to my long-time buddy and professional gardener and herbalist at Herb and Roots Permaculture. After chatting and catching up a bit on the past year, I loaded up few boxes of greens and veggie starts, along with my favorite herb starts and headed back to my valley. After some critical decision making on the placement and arrangement of the new year’s garden, the fun part finally began; getting my hands dirty and putting the baby plants into the earth to start their new life in my garden.

Gardening is such a process. And the garden became a place where I could process; a place where it was ok for me to let go and feel the deepest, intense pain and fully grieve. No one was around to judge my anger or make me feel like I needed to push my grief aside and put a fake smile on my face; No one was around to tell me not to cry when sometimes all I could do was sit down on the ground from digging and just cry. Grief is a long and multi-layered process, with swift and abrupt transitions through a wide range of almost inflamed emotions, forcefully pulling the mind down a river of wild currents. In order to make our way through grief and come out on the other side, we must feel it fully; there is no ‘shoving it under the rug and it will just go away.’

Though many, many, many of the heaviest tears fell from my puffy eyes and hit the soil beneath me as I worked, after a few weeks, I realized I was beginning to do much better, both mentally and emotionally. I was outside, moving, digging, sweating in the afternoon sun, getting chill bumps in the shade of the evening, soaking up sunshine, getting rained on, breathing in fresh air. I was focused. I was dreaming of how amazing and lush this little garden was going to be in the summer. I even felt excitement of what was to come from this little plot I’d carved out of the grassy yard. I was taking moments to look up from my dirt-covered hands, wiping tears away with the sleeve of my shirt so that I could watch the clouds, name the birds whose songs filled the valley, notice that the trees’ leaves were filling out more and more each day. I watched from the garden as Flickers found their mates in the near by Catawba tree and in the evenings, I’d quietly sit inside my garden fence as the resident flock of twelve Turkeys came in from the fields and crossed the meadow to roost up in the protective trees of the woods. Each evening, I’d count to make sure all eight adults and four babies were present and accounted for. Each morning, I would open the curtains of my little farm house and eagerly look out into my garden at my quickly growing plants and feel like life was somewhat ok in that moment.

The evening view from inside my garden of the turkeys in the meadow. — Photo by Patti Wren Byrd

I was starting to come back to life and heal, bit by bit. And my plants were starting to fill out and take over my little garden space. I had worked so hard, week after week, pouring my very heart and soul into this tiny patch of earth and now, it was truly something to behold. It was a lush paradise of a variety of greens, cucumbers, bright red cherry tomatoes, basil, lemon balm, tulsi, little dots of yellow chamomile flowers, spearmint and peppermint, thyme and oregano, rouge arugula from the year before and giant butternut squash, all decorated with magnificent pops of glowing yellows, oranges and reds of delicate nasturtium flowers and hearty marigolds. Surrounding the enclosure was the mystery vine that a previous owner had planted. I decided to allow this unknown vine to crawl along the chicken-wire fence in the early spring my first year at this house, not entirely sure what it was at first. My reward for letting it sprawl over my garden wall was the incredible abundance of little white flowers it exploded into in the late summer; the sweetest smelling flowers who’s rich, almost intoxicating aroma lofted in on the warm August air through my open windows, filling my little hardwood floor house with their heavenly frangrance.