When the government announced lockdown towards the end of March after I’d just got home from university, the world suddenly felt strange and full of uncertainty. “Out of sorts” would be the best way to describe how I felt for the first few weeks of lockdown. Like the majority of people, I found it hard to adjust to a world of online university, video calls with friends and family, home workouts, and hovering around the TV every day at 5pm for the daily government bulletins on BBC News. When confronted with lockdown, we all had to find other ways to have a good time. Whether it was Zoom pub quizzes, volunteering, studying, working out, baking or learning a new skill, there was no shortage of options. As for myself, I decided to tackle my rapidly relapsing anxiety by taking up gardening!
Gardening used to be the preserve of pensioners. When someone says gardening, we tend to think of an OAP lovingly tending a vegetable garden. It’s a decidedly wholesome pastime, and so perhaps it’s unsurprising in the age of COVID-19- where we’re spending so much of our time indoors- glued to screens, that gardening has become something of a balm to all that screen time. In true 2020 style, however, the gardening’s image makeover has been fuelled by its surge in popularity on social media, thanks to the rise of the “gardening influencers”. Yes, they exist. Whether on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter or Facebook, this new breed of influencer has been taking social media by storm since the start of the pandemic, with many of them accruing millions of followers. Through the power of social media, gardening influencers have managed to reach a wider (and younger) audience. For perhaps the first time since the Second World War, gardening isn’t just being perceived as a pastime for middle aged white people. Many of the most successful gardening influencers, like Fanny Liao, Kevin Espiritu and Timmothy Hammond, are young people of colour. These influencers are helping to demystify and democratise access to gardening so that its joys can be something which are genuinely accessible to everyone.
Not that the joys themselves are anything new: gardening has long been touted as the activity to help us to escape from our increasingly industrialised society and rebuild our relationships with nature. Gardens themselves are symbolic of the relationship between industrialisation and nature, as one of the few places where urbanites can enjoy all the sights and sound nature has to offer- birdsong, bees buzzing, flowers in bloom, falling leaves. In times like this, when nature is one of the few things unaltered by lockdowns, this relationship is more important than ever. It is also vital to nurture it during the unprecedented climate crisis which our world is now facing. Gardening is one of the few pastimes which has a profoundly positive impact on our environment: gardens and increased green space do not just improve air quality, but also provide essential habitats for wildlife, flora and fauna (including bees!) and reduce our own carbon footprints (if we grow our own food). It was another reason why I was inspired to start gardening.
Before the pandemic, my own garden had been (to be blunt), fairly neglected. With all the spare time on my hands, I decidedto give my garden a glow-up. Initially, I wasn’t “gardening” properly, so much as giving it some TLC: weeding (a LOT, remodelling and re-planting. As the days turned into weeks and the weeds disappeared, the garden started to transform. I felt like a proud parent! But it wasn’t just the garden reaping the benefits of my sudden enthusiasm for getting green-fingered. As the Easter holidays ended and an online Easter term at university started, my workload started piling up again and I found myself spending more and more time hunched over my desk, staring at a screen and feeling overwhelmed. Thanks to gardening, though, I managed to make a habit of spending any snatches of spare time in the garden. The tasks didn’t even have to be huge- weeding a few weeds, planting or watering a plant or two or even just mowing the lawn- but they still made a noticeable difference to my mood, whatever the weather. I always felt less overwhelmed after I’d spent some time with my gardening gloves on. There’s something about nurturing plants – whether they’re broccoli, dahlias, or just a basil plant on the windowsill- that’s innately therapeutic.
Spending time outdoors has long been prescribed as an antidote to poor mental health. Gardening in particular has a wealth of benefits. Not only does it reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, but it’s also great for reducing the symptoms of anxiety disorders, depression and OCD- what’s a better distraction than looking after your garden? In the COVID era especially, it’s easy to feel like everything is spinning out of our control, but gardening can give you something which is still within your control (at least until the slugs hit). Beyond the mental health benefits, gardening is also a great source of food security if you grow your own veg in your own garden or a community garden. With an impending economic depression, food security will take on even greater significance for thousands of people.
However, as much as it’s tempting to harp on about all the joys of gardening, there’s also a darker side. Even if the rise of gardening influencers might be heralding in a more inclusive and diverse era for gardening, where no knowledge about gardening or even a garden is required, gardening still remains inaccessible to large swathes marginalised communities. With access to green space (including community gardens) often limited for those living in poorer communities as well as poorer communities of colour, the dearth of community allotments in the UK highlights that there are still serious accessibility issues.
Despite the surge in demand for plots on community allotments during the pandemic (for all of the above reasons), a recent study found that the amount of land used for allotments has fallen by 65% over the last 50 years. By 2016, almost half (47.9%) of the land used for allotments had been built on. In poorer neighbourhoods, allotments were eight times more likely to be removed than in affluent neighbourhoods. Not only are those living in poorer neighbourhoods less likely to have their own gardens: now, they are less likely to be able to have their own allotment. Large swathes of our population are being denied the simple joys of gardening just because of their postcodes. Not only that, but those who are most at risk of food insecurity are missing out on the opportunities to take back autonomy by growing their own food. Meanwhile, the lost land of former allotments could have grown an average of 2.5k tonnes of food per year to feed the inhabitants of the UK’s towns and cities.
The gardening influencers can only do so much to improve access: the reclaiming of community allotments is the solution needed for long-term change. If the popularity of gardening is going to endure- which it should, because the benefits are genuinely impressive- then more radical action needs to be taken by local government to ensure that it is an activity which can truly be enjoyed by everyone, irrespective of whether they have their own garden or not.
A Northern Girl in a Southern World 