Gardening for Wellness
By Emmy Ulmschneider, Permian Basin Master Gardener
We have all felt the healing power of gardens, and that extends to our home landscapes. This year, the Permian Basin Master Gardener Summer Symposium, on August 15, will focus on how gardening can improve your well-being! The symposium will explore the therapeutic benefits of gardening for mental health, introduce the health benefits of some commonly grown herbs, and demonstrate how a pollinator patch supports local wildlife and you.
Starting in the 1990s, educators, farmers, park rangers, health practitioners, and state agencies began asking questions about patterns emerging within their disciplines. By 2005, several pivotal books, documentaries, and studies began to coalesce these patterns into trends. So, what did they notice? They noticed that, as a nation, we were spending less time outside, and obesity and other health-related problems were increasing. Pivotal books such as Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and E.O. Wilson’s The Biophilia Hypothesis suggested that there could be a common cause. Early in the next decade, diverse groups began sharing findings and collaborating on answers. In 2017, The Nature of Americans National Report came out and documents these changes, suggesting that they negatively impact our health, well-being, and quality of life. They found that today’s children have less time for unstructured creative play outside in natural surroundings, even though we know children who learn and play in nature are physically and mentally healthier, more capable, and more confident.
Even now, this trend of decreased physical and mental well-being resulting in increased depression continues. In a 2024 presentation at the Texas Master Gardener Conference, Dr. Jay Maddock, an American public health expert and the Director of the Center for Health and Nature at Houston Methodist Hospital, documents how spending time in nature improves our health and suggests we need to start a trend of turning plants from pretty to necessary! Subsequent studies have shown that people who have higher levels of outdoor exposure utilized fewer mental health services for anxiety and depression and concluded that the happiest people spend more time outside! We can all benefit from reduced stress, better sleep, and improved social connectedness. There is no pill for these benefits, but perhaps the antidote is spending thirty minutes a day outside in your garden. Whether you garden for food, wildlife, or beauty, you will be immersed in what you see and connected to the neighborhood around you. And these benefits increase with the density of natural elements such as vegetation. There is even a website that can give you a score for how natural, “green” your neighborhood is! (See https://www.naturequant.com/naturescore/)
So, consider starting your journey to better health by spending time outside in your garden. Whether you garden for food, wildlife, or mental health, you will reap the benefits that go far beyond what you see!
If you have questions, call the AgriLife office in Odessa at 498-4071 or in Midland at 686-4700. Additional information and our blog, with access to past articles, are available at westtexasgardening.org. Click on “Resources".
