The Healing Power of Gardens
This article focuses a lot on large, well curated gardens, but I'm an engineer who found a lot of solace and safety in managing my own garden. (As someone who has faced burnout and anxiety from work before.)There's something about planning, planting, and then caring for a garden that appeals to my engineer brain. It's an exercise in organization and planning that scales from "throw seeds at dirt" to "these plants will attract bees near these other plants, these plants will repel insects. These will bloom early, these bloom late".You can grow flowers, you can grow vegetables which you can turn into cooked, canned, or pickled food.There's something about putting food on a plate that came from your yard, from your care. There's something about sitting in a green (or red, or blue, or yellow, etc.) space that you made.I'm a sucker for games like Minecraft, Factorio, etc. Raising a garden is like a slow motion version of those things. It's a fusion of creative and scientific/engineering brains. It's great.