By Anna Soref

Spring in Colorado. The ground remains stubbornly frozen, the trees still wait for their baby green buds, but Jill Reisdorf passes the time gardening—mentally gardening that is. She simply can’t wait to spend warm days with her hands deep in the earth of her front yard, planting seeds that will grow into perennial flowers and herbs that spring back miraculously to life after dormant winters. Ask Reisdorf why she gardens, and she smiles. “It’s like parenting; I have pride in something alive that I have creatively nurtured—and the entire process is magical, pleasurable.”

For many people, tending the garden has very little to do with impressing the neighbors. Rather, gardening stems from a primal desire, something they just “need to do.” For others, it provides a way to reconnect with nature and take a break from the computer screen. With research demonstrating that simply looking at a garden lowers blood pressure and stimulates relaxation, developing a green thumb might be a wise intention for everyone.

Digging In
Gardening plugs us into the essence of life and unplugs us from our technological world, says Peg Streep, author of Spiritual Gardening: Creating Sacred Space Outdoors (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003). “Gardening is one of the few activities that engages all five senses intensely, even simultaneously—you become alert to what you see, feel, hear, smell, and even taste,” Streep says. “There’s a degree of physical connection there that engages you on every level. When you are on your knees, digging in the earth, that is really all that you are doing.”

Tending plants helps us glimpse the birth-growth-death cycle of life, something our culture has become grossly detached from, according to Streep. “A seed is really the embodiment of the life force. You put it in the ground, you watch it grow, you tend the plants, and then it dies off—it’s a lesson in nurturing and mortality.”

In engaging directly with the life cycle, you also realize the fragility of the ecosystem, which serves to connect you with larger environmental issues, says Maureen “Mo” Gilmer, author of more than 15 books on gardening and host and project designer for the DIY Network television series Weekend Gardening. “It makes people realize how delicate nature is and teaches us that there is order in nature. Through growing your first tomato or flower, you learn that everything interrelates so you can’t do one thing over here and have it not impact something over there. If you can see it in this little tiny microcosm in your backyard, you learn how profoundly your decisions can affect things on a big scale.”

And while we can’t help but be proud of that first tomato, gardening also teaches humility. “No matter how good a gardener you are, you cannot control what will ultimately happen in the garden,” Streep says. She recalls her first garden in Vermont, which she so diligently tended, only to have it become a woodchuck’s salad bar. “Again, the forces of nature play upon us; we cannot control rain or drought.”

Tending plants not only allows them to grow, but grows the gardener’s love as well, says Judith Handelsman, author of Growing Myself: A Spiritual Journey Through Gardening (Plume Paperback, 1997). “You hear these stories about how gardening changes people’s lives, how it eases heartache or turns a