When the Garden Teaches You How to Grow
How I learned that tending a garden is like attending to my emotional wellbeing. Discover why gardening might just be the gentlest teacher of all and the life lessons it might hold for you.
We often talk about personal growth like it’s something we can hack or schedule: an efficient morning routine here, a life-affirming listicle there. But growth—real, emotional, soul-deep growth—doesn’t always work like that.
What if the better metaphor isn’t a staircase going ever upwards… but a garden?
Because while we search for clarity, balance, or simply a day that feels like “enough,” we forget that the slow, subtle tending we do matters too. And nowhere has that been more apparent to me than in my garden.
When I first began gardening, I thought I was there to grow flowers. I didn’t realise I’d be unearthing something else entirely.
The spinach bolting too soon mirrored parts of myself I’d neglected. The alliums blooming after months of dark reminded me that beauty often requires quiet persistence. And the mess? That was its own kind of magic.
My garden began teaching me the lessons more often held in books on self-improvement
That manifesting without doing is like planting without watering.
That completion is hard—not because we can’t finish things, but because we forget to savour when we do.
That wildness isn’t chaos—it’s aliveness.
That rhythms matter, and sometimes staying still is part of tending too.
Most surprisingly, I learned that I didn’t have to get everything right. Not in the garden. And not in myself.
Sue Stuart-Smith wrote, “The mind needs to be gardened too.” And once I read it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how true that is.
Gardening asks us to:
Observe without rushing.
Accept mistakes without shame.
Work with the seasons, not against them.
Let go of perfect outcomes.
And return, again and again, to the same patch of ground.
In other words—it’s the same practice that wellbeing demands of us.
You don’t need to own a garden to live this way. But you do need to notice what’s already growing.
If the garden has taught me anything, it’s this:
There will always be weeds. You are not failing because things still need clearing.
Rest counts. Sitting in your garden is still tending to it.
Growth doesn’t announce itself. Often it’s quiet, a cucumber hidden behind a leaf, a shift in mindset you barely notice.
You don’t need to be the expert. Just the one who shows up.
This is the version of wellbeing I believe in: imperfect, seasonal, and rooted in presence rather than performance.
So tell me—what’s growing for you right now?
What do you notice when you look at your days not as tasks to complete but as something to tend?
Let’s start a new kind of growth together: slower, kinder, and more alive.
If this resonated with you, sign up for the newsletter for our take on personal growth (hint: we never call it personal growth outside of a gardening metaphor). Or explore our wellbeing courses where we start, not with goals, but with grounding.
We can cultivate a different kind of wellbeing together: one that feels messy, but real, and offers its own kind of beauty..
Image: made with Freepik
Grow2Know
A London based not-for-profit bringing the therapeutic benefits of gardening to young people and changing who gets to garden one project at a time.
What is it: “The healing power of nature in the community”. Grow 2Know is a not-for-profit based in the community of North Kensington aiming to make horticulture more inclusive, by inspiring, supporting, and educating young diverse gardeners through greening disused spaces across London.
What you need to know: In the aftermath of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, local semi-professional footballer Tayshan Hayden-Smith who had lost friends in the fire turned to nature for healing, greening the spaces in the surrounding community as a form of therapy. With other community members in North Kensington, he founded the Grenfell Garden of Peace, a sanctuary and a symbol of resilience. Now with Danny Clarke aka The Black Gardener (and the first black gardener to be given a TV show, The Instant Gardener in 2015) and Ali Yellop a local agriculturalist, all of whom have Jamaican heritage, Hayden Smith has started Grow2Know. Through designing, building and collaborating on community gardens, Grow2Know aims to shift the narrative of who gets to garden and who gets access to green spaces.
Projects have included taking over a discussed green space at Morley College, transforming it into a place of tranquility with the help of members, staff and students. This year, Grow2Know will participate in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show creating a garden centered on the Caribbean community, and inspired by the now closed North Kensington Caribbean restaurant The Mangrove which in the 1970s was frequently the target of police. Future projects also include a Calisthenics exercise garden to reinforce the physical benefits of green spaces and a collaboration with Steel Warriors, who use salvaged steel from melted down confiscated knives to build outdoor exercise gyms.
Why we think it matters: This pandemic has made overt the connection between nature and our mental wellbeing, but persistent social inequalities mean that not everyone has access to those benefits. As Grow2know has noted “if you live on the 20th floor of a tower block what reason do you have to currently get involved in gardening?”. Gardening pulls together disparate threads all impacted by racial justice, from environmentalism — the quality of the air we breathe and who feels most the consequences of climate change — through to food insecurity (having access to fruit and vegetables through urban farming initiatives). Grow2Know aims to shape the conversation around gardening by mitigating some of these issues. Their approach takes a broad view, diversifying who has access to green spaces while showing young people the mental health benefits of gardening, and the connections between nutrition and growing food. The benefits of gardening here are far-reaching, experienced personally as therapy and support, and more widely, making communities more conducive to mental wellbeing and connection.
In their own words: “Grow2Know aims to heal, inspire, empower & educate using horticulture – planting seeds in the minds of young people & giving them the necessary tools to make a positive impact in their communities. We aim to change the narrative & break the mould on the stereotypes of what it is like to be a gardener & what a gardener may look like, & in turn, create a more inclusive industry. We feel that gardening is a pretty cool thing to do & it is our mission to exhibit just how cool it is.”
Something to do: Follow one of Mind’s tips for getting into nature wherever you are, such as bringing nature inside, helping the environment, and growing your own food.
Discover more ways to enhance your well-being through the natural world
Mind Food
As MindFood’s motto goes, “Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.” The Ealing-based social enterprise has this idea at its core: it’s founded on nature and uses food as the framework for figuring out our mental health concerns.
“We support people to improve their wellbeing through growing and selling food.”
Did you know that as you grow your tomatoes or tend that cabbage patch, you are also doing something deeply therapeutic?
The Ealing-based social enterprise MindFood has this idea at its core: its founded on nature and uses food as the framework for figuring out our mental health concerns, whether we’re struggling with common conditions like depression, anxiety, and stress, including PTSD, or we’re just curious about plotting and planning our own psychological health and wellbeing. As their motto goes, “Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes.”
Chatting to co-founder and director, Ciaran Biggins, he points out that, “An environment of nature and growing food is a perfect way to practice the Five Ways to Wellbeing as identified by the New Economics Foundation”. So if we break that down, you get connection in the form of the community around you. You are able to take your time and pay attention whether that’s to changing seasons or to something you planted. You take on the role of an active learner, specifically here about horticulture. You get to give back through the systems of sharing and support that MindFood is grounded in. And lastly, you get to be physically active, getting those wellies on and hands dirty.
Drawing from the evidence base of nature’s calming effect and the restorative practice of planting, cultivating and selling food, Biggins created a program that involved “spending more time learning about food, building community, and being in nature in a supportive environment.”
Want to get involved? MindFood offers a starter program: a free six-week course, Growing Wellbeing, which covers the theoretical and practical relationship of nature and wellbeing. It’s all “action orientated to encourage behaviour change.”
And for those who want to continue their involvement, there’s Plot to Plate, 12 weeks of working to cultivate the produce in their allotment, then selling it from their Market Stall in Acton (which inscribes a whole other level of value and purpose for what you’ve just achieved).
To find out more: www.mindfood.org.uk / Twitter @MindFoodCIC / facebook.com/MindFoodCIC
Mental Wellbeing
Just think about how this usually plays out:
You’ve been feeling a bit off, something’s not quite right in your life. You are not sure what it is but you’re becoming less interested in life, you are heading to bed early, you’ve started to turn down invites to go out.
Or you are stuck. Your career isn’t what you thought it would be. That marriage isn’t so full of love and happiness anymore. Your family life is making it hard to breathe, your Pinterest boards and schedule of playdates are looking shoddy.
Or you are just so bloody lonely. You haven’t had a decent conversation in months. You’ve thought about calling someone but who? You watch shows with groups of friends and cry at the credits because it’s so heartbreakingly distant from where you are. Your PJs are becoming day clothes.
Or you are fed up. Or terrified of everything. Or shutting down. Or grumpy as hell. Or just urgh.
So, what to do to about it – well you could do nothing. That probably feels about right.
Or you could do something – you’ve heard about some pill that might help so you head to the doctor’s surgery. You know a friend who once went to therapy and thought it was kind of great, so maybe you could try that. Either would be fine. And for many people that really is.
And / Or maybe you could do something else. Really what we’re trying to do here is find the thing that works for you. Everyone is different.
Anxiety and depression are rapidly rising in the UK and US, and our ability to talk about and treat these conditions is changing. What’s available to us is shifting. Beyond the usual suspects, medication and talk therapy, there’s more, much more – initiatives, spaces and people that can help us in new and creative ways. There are brilliant, inspiring and creative things that are available to us around connection, and meaning, and purpose, that might make you feel better, and good, and valued. If you feel any of these conditions, others feel it too, and people are doing great, non-stigmatizing things about it.
Many of these draw from people’s own frustrated experiences finding the help they need. Whether in the case of Ciaran Biggins of MindFood talking to people and realizing that the day centers that they attended weren’t giving them the sense of purpose and connection they were looking for; or Ali Strick, founder of Arts Sisterhood, who tried to find art therapy groups in London, but found instead “programs within medium-security mental hospitals that needed a doctor’s referral, art therapy for children or the mentally/physically disabled or extremely expensive one-on-one art therapy.” Or with Bryony Gordon of Mental Health Mates who wanted “a kind of regular meet-up that other organizations have, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, but aimed at people with mental health issues, and for that to be combined with getting out the house and doing some gentle exercise: in our case, walking.”
We’re including here some of these places, and more, that you can head to when you’re wobbling, struggling, plummeting, or just drowning and not really waving at all. Just search for ‘mental wellbeing’ in the categories and find your place.