7 Strange but Surprisingly Worthwhile Things to do in Your Garden

Gus the Kelpie in the garden

We humans have an interesting - and surprisingly common - tendency to turn our passions into work. Into goals and achievements, outcomes, KPIs and personal bests. Never has that been more apparent than during this new age of ‘side hustles’ and social media. Our projects and favourite pastimes can now be loudly broadcast to the big wide world, uploaded onto Etsy, quantified, capitalised and - sometimes - totally adulterated in favour of money, social status or clout.

It’s funny how hard it is to avoid the feeling that we can’t just love doing something for the sake of it. Everything tends to become about the outcome, rather than the process. We fixate on the final photo or the finished product. We can’t just doodle, we need to make art and stick it on Etsy. We can’t just strum on a guitar, we have to learn guitar, master it, join a band, get a record deal, make millions. I think part of the problem is there are just so many bloody talented people online and all of them seem to have populated Instagram, created web stores and turned what they love into a 6+ figure salary. But when did it all have to be about making money and getting recognition? Have we forgotten how to do things for the simple pleasure of doing them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not preaching this from on high. I’m probably the worst example of all. I’ve spent the last three years working to turn my greatest passion - gardening - into a full time job. And my second greatest passion - cooking - into an endless series of seasonal recipe books! Last Christmas I made lino cards, printed several hundred of them and spruiked them to the internet all through December. And yes, it was fun, but at some point around the end of November when I was up at 12am covered in ink and gnashing my teeth together folding brown paper cards in half, I admit I did wonder whether what I was doing was more compulsion than hobby.

I’m trying to get better at doing things simply for the pure pleasure of doing them, without thinking they have to lead somewhere. But the interesting thing I’ve found is that, as much as the urge to ‘hustle’ seems to regularly invade many of my much-loved hobbies, it almost always falls away once I’m out in the garden. Maybe because gardens are always changing, blooming, dying and growing. When there’s no real ‘end’ to a project, no ultimate goal and no permanent, static achievement, you’re forced to prioritise the moment-to-moment experience over the outcome.

A yellow and orange-flecked ranunculus bud

Fire engine red ranunculus flower

Gardens bring us up close and personal with the fact that everything is transient. One morning there will be sunshine and, moments later, rain. Plants rush into blooms, which - in just a few short days - will wither and fade, turning crisp in the sun. You pull them out, throw them in the compost, the compost rots, you spread it through new garden beds where new flowers will no doubt soon be fading too. Gardening forces us to confront the ultimate silliness of all of our endeavours and to find beauty and pleasure in them anyway. It shoves impermanence in our faces and makes us realise that the reason for doing anything in life (no matter what it is) can’t really be based around some final ‘achievement’.

In the garden, we aren’t allowed the luxury of pretending there’s an endpoint we can strive to reach because a garden can never really be finished and is always in flux. In the shifting sands of our flowerbeds we learn that real meaning hides in the perfumed petals of a stock flower deeply inhaled, in a bee’s yellow knickerbockers or the trill of a magpie’s morning warble. We’re forced to find beauty and meaning in small moments and little things (which is where I think they’ve probably always lived, anyway). 

So today, here are 7 strange (often underrated) but surprisingly worthwhile things to do in your garden. They won’t turn into pretty instagram posts and they won’t make any of us look especially accomplished, successful, driven or impressive. Mostly because they’re weird and involve a reasonable amount of dirt. But I guarantee they will bring you back to the moment, connect you to the ground and the bugs and all the things you’re growing, and - most importantly - they will make you feel good.

(Incidentally, I did every single one of these things yesterday. 10/10 would recommend.)

Spring flowers under the mulberry tree

1. Lie face down on the grass and watch ants

The sun is on your back, soft lawn on your belly (just watch out for grass cuts!) and all you have to do is focus on a single lone adventurer carrying a tiny crumb across a wild, spiked, green landscape. There is something so peaceful about watching minute fragments of nature play out up close. Maybe it helps us get outside of our own minds. Maybe it reminds us that even as our daily worries and woes persist there are a million other ever-present lifeforms going about their days, busy with their own jobs.

2. Get your knees grubby (on purpose)

Cleanliness be damned! Remember when you were a kid and the goal was to get messy? As adults it’s so easy to get sidetracked, worrying about muddying the clothes we paid good money for, tracking dirt back in through the house or having to wash/blow-dry/style our hair yet AGAIN. Toss those worries in a little muddy hole and jump in after them! Things can always be cleaned, floors mopped, hair left to curl unkempt. But there’s a valuable kind of liberation in deciding that a bit of mess doesn’t matter. It forces you to relax and re-enter the present and give some of those day-to-day priorities a little shake-up. Fists-in-the-earth living (a term I have coined just this moment) is also thought to contribute to a healthier and more diverse gut microbiome, which has been associated with reduced anxiety and greater wellbeing. It doesn’t really matter how you do it. Dig a hole for a new plant, kneel in your garden bed to sniff a rose, get twigs in your hair. Whatever gets you out into the muck and mire, casting off the shackles of grown-up propriety, communing with the worms and ruining your fingernails.

A lilac hyacinth poking out from a clay pot

3. Go barefoot

I always garden barefoot! And only recently read (in Brooke McAlary’s excellent new book, Care) that it’s actually good for your mental well-being to toss the shoes and hop around like our distant ancestors. It made me think about how weird and numbing it would be if we always wore gloves on our hands. Imagine that! You could never run your hands across fresh rosemary to catch the scent, or let a silk scarf slip through you'd fingers. So many missed opportunities for sensations and tactile pleasures. But it’s something we do every day to our feet! So spend the afternoon shoe-less in your garden. Feel the cool earth underfoot, feel spiky grasses, soft rocks, walk along low-brick garden walls and test your balance (recent studies have found that our modern lifestyles have degraded our balance, but a little bit of wall-hopping can help!) . Let the whole world of podiatric stimuli in for an afternoon (and notice how much easier it is to garden without accidentally trampling your plants - just watch out for those rose prunings!)

Garden wilderness, with borage, rosemary and tall spikes of mizuna in flower

4. Get on your hands and knees & eat a lettuce like a cow

No really, try it. Try it and then tell me what you think. Cast off your dignified human tendencies! Eschew the lettuce spinner and salad bowl and eat your lettuce like a cow! Munch your salad greens direct from the garden and you’ll really, truly feel like the earth is feeding you. Also it’s just very fun and silly and everyone should do it at least once in their life. Especially if you don’t really like green leafy things or have kids who don’t really like to eat green leafy things (it’s way more fun and much tastier when you’re a cow!). Hell, get the whole family out there in the front garden (who cares what the neighbours think!) and eat your wild rocket together like a small herd of grazing sheep.

Sitting in the wilderness at the back of the garden; nasturtiums, peach blossoms & purple borage

5. Sit directly underneath your plants

When I was in year 12, feeling stressed out by a combination of teenage angst and exam fears, I developed a strange desire to crawl under a big, leafy shrub, find a patch of cool, quiet earth and just sit there. And until yesterday I couldn’t work out if that urge was some form of temporary psychosis or a very well-founded desire for a sensible and necessary human activity. Then yesterday I went outside and sat under a giant mustard green and chomped on it and realised that it is, in fact, a deeply sane insane desire.

Sitting in the shade, hidden by the elephantine leaves and watching the sunlight turn them them gold and translucent, I remembered that this is exactly what kids do all the time. At parks, in gardens, playing hide and seek and actually getting themselves deeply ensconced by shrubs and plants. It is so rare, in adulthood, to feel enclosed by nature. We might feel it occasionally, under the canopy of a large tree or on some kind of jungle walk, but by and large this experience has disappeared from our lives. So it’s easy to forget how wonderful it feels.

Much like kneeling on all fours and eating your salad greens like a cow, I think this is something you just have to experience to appreciate. It sounds like such a small, silly thing, but I find it weirdly profound and excessively peaceful.

The spring garden, filled with daisies, ranunculus, salvias and sparaxis

6. Eat little bits of all your edible plants

I’m pretty sure I have already waxed on at length about how I want my garden to feel like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Albeit a version containing substantially less sucrose and sadly no fizzy lifting drink. But when I decide to go outside and spend fifteen minutes nibbling on all our edible plants I swear there may as well be a chocolate river and an 11 year old girl whinging about golden eggs.

It’s amazing, don’t you think, that we have evolved to be able to eat such a wide and colourful array of plants! To slurp the syrupy nectar from a nasturtium, before biting down on its peppery orange petals. To enjoy mint, parsley, basil, thyme, lemongrass and pineapple sage for all of their uniquely compelling flavours. To pluck a mulberry from a tree, to eat a fresh peach or a cucumber still warm from the sun. It’s easy to forget just how cool it is that we can grow so many wild things and simply eat them, right there in the middle of the garden. So go give that a go and remind yourself how cool you are for growing things you can eat.

Passionfruit marigolds (they smell like, you guessed it, passionfruit!)

7. Smell every fragrant plant you grow

Not only can we take edible tours of our gardens, we can take olfactory tours too. I don’t think I have ever found a perfume as beautiful as the deeply inhaled scent of a stock flower in the early morning or a moonflower opening at dusk, its heady perfume a lure for nighttime pollinators. Our human creations are, for the most part, pale imitations of the kinds of fragrances we can grow in our own backyards.

It also happens that nothing takes the edge off a bad mood like 10 minutes wandering your garden checking how absolutely everything smells.

And don’t limit yourself to the flowers either. Smell the herbs, crush their leaves between your fingers. Smell the grass, the furry skin of a fresh peach or the leaf of a tomato. Once you start exploring you’ll realise that almost EVERYTHING smells, and almost everything smells beautiful (although note I have intentionally avoided recommending an olfactory tour of your compost tumbler).

We often think of our gardens as places to make look beautiful, places to entertain, or places to grow useful things. But they offer us so much more as well. Exercises in mindfulness, escape routes from frustrating moments, opportunities for daily awe and joy and an ever-deepening appreciation for the natural world. And - as I believe I have now thoroughly demonstrated in this blog post - they also offer us the opportunity to find happiness in strange places. To be muddy and grubby and weird where no one but the crow and the caterpillar can judge us (and let’s face it, they’ve both got better things to do).

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