By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay lightly revised on 21 August 2026.
Why do we garden? We spend extraordinary amounts of time and effort digging, planting, pruning, watering, and weeding, only to have to do it all over again. Yet gardens have been with us since the beginnings of civilisation, serving not merely as sources of food but as expressions of power, religion, philosophy, and our relationship with nature.
Ineni, architect to Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1492 BCE), had his garden painted into his tomb, along with a list of all the trees within it—presumably, so that they might be accounted for in the afterlife.
Ineni’s garden included:
- 170 date palms
- 120 doum palms
- 73 sycamore figs
- 31 persea
- 16 carob
- 12 grapevines
- 10 tamarisks
- 8 willows
- 5 figs
- 5 pomegranates
- 5 garland thorns
- 2 moringas
- 2 myrtles…
A grand garden of this sort symbolised control and mastery over nature, a haven of peace and plenty, of order and beauty, by which to project the status, power, and temperament of its owner. Other, more famous, examples include the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Gardens of the Real Alcázar in Seville, and the Gardens of Versailles.
The garden could also have a religious or philosophical message or dimension. For example, the Old Testament’s four rivers of Eden are represented by four watercourses in Islamic paradise gardens, and four paths in Christian cloister gardens. The Zen garden, by hinting at hidden principles, serves as an aid to meditation about the true meaning of existence.
The Gardens at Versailles reflect a rationalist, Cartesian vision of God-given ideas and principles for the intellect to apprehend, whereas English landscape gardens are more in the empiricist mould, presenting nature as a stream of sensory experiences skirting across the blank slate of the mind.
In either case, the garden represents a taming of nature, from dark and deadly forest, or disease-infested swamp, to an extension of our living space: open and structured to still our minds, but retaining enough mystery to sustain our interest and even, perhaps, capture our imagination.
Trees as Symbols
Individual plants too can have a meaning. English churchyards often feature yew trees, which are poisonous, dark, and evergreen, and symbolise both death and immortality. A yew tree is commonly found near the lychgate, where, prior to the advent of mortuaries, the dead awaited burial while mourners kept vigil.
In the ancient world, the palm tree symbolised victory, peace, and bounty, while the cedar of Lebanon symbolised pride, majesty, and dignity. Both also stood for righteousness, as in Psalm 92:12: ‘the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree, grow tall like the cedar of Lebanon.’ Today, Cedrus libani is the national emblem of Lebanon, and a symbol of the peaceful Cedar Revolution of 2005.
Trees can also be planted to mark an important occasion, which is why British royals are often asked to brandish a shovel. In an annual tradition, the Friends of my local park purchase a noteworthy tree and invite a dignitary such as the Lord Mayor to plant it.
A New Religion?
Today, gardens and gardening are more popular than ever. Millions of people in the UK garden, whether in a garden, on an allotment, or simply on a balcony.
The BBC’s flagship Gardeners’ World, presented by Monty Don, attracts millions of viewers—which, in the UK, is many more people than go to church.
Community garden projects and ‘guerrilla gardening’ are on the rise, as are garden towns and villages. A few years ago, one of my neighbours organised for thousands of daffodils to be planted on a neglected and overlooked common, transforming it into a Wordsworthian idyll for the selfie generation. I wonder, do they know that ‘daffodil’ is Narcissus in Latin?
Good for Mind and Body
Gardening is more and more recognised, and even prescribed, for its health benefits. These include increased muscle strength and cardiovascular fitness; improved sleep and diet (if you grow your own produce); reduced stress, anxiety, and depression; a greater sense of community and belonging; and better self-esteem.
You don’t even have to get your hands dirty: some of these benefits accrue simply from visiting a garden, or even just looking over one—although it probably helps to notice and mentally engage with the greenery.
Researchers in Korea randomly assigned hospital patients recovering from thyroidectomy to rooms with plants and flowers, and rooms without, and found that the test group fared significantly better, asking for less pain relief and requiring less time in hospital. So yes, it makes sense to bring flowers, and, at home, to have indoor plants.
Even street trees greatly benefit our health. An American study looking at the city of Toronto found that, for cardio-metabolic conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity…), an increase of just 11 trees per city block had a comparable effect to an increase in annual personal income of USD 20,000.
How might gardening help with mental health? To various degrees, we live inside the stories we tell ourselves. But gardening drags us out of our tortured heads and back into the natural world, which blunts the ideological and emotional extremes to which detached, abstract thought is prone.
In 1920, a mentally strained Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the post of assistant gardener at Klosterneuburg Abbey, explaining in a letter to a friend that he had been longing for ‘some kind of regularized work which, of all the things I can do in my present condition, is the most nearly bearable…’
Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is an attack on the highly abstracted, convoluted, and strained philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz (whom I nevertheless love), and famously concludes with the phrase ‘we must cultivate our garden.’
The Gardening of the Soul
In the Philosophy of Existence (1938), Karl Jaspers describes this disinterested process of looking outside oneself—or phenomenology, as it is sometimes called—as ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me.’
Just picture the gardener’s pure and simple delight at the first crocuses or tulips, a bird’s nest, a swarm of bees…
If gardening makes us feel better, it also makes us into better people. It is a moral education, a school of life, instilling virtues such as pragmatism, patience, perseverance, reliability, and humility, which then transfer out into other spheres.
In his treatise on agriculture (c. 160 BCE), Cato is quite clear that farmers make the bravest and strongest soldiers, and that, of all men, they are ‘the most highly respected, most stable, and least hated (minime invidiosus).’
In Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), Socrates compares the wise man to the good husbandman, who is careful to scatter the right seed in the right soil in the right season. Similarly, the good teacher is careful to sow the right words in the right soul at the right time. For Plato, the Divine Teacher, teaching is the gardening of the soul.
Building on these notions, Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) founded his philosophical school in a garden just outside Athens. The Garden sought to return to an agricultural golden age of harmony, community, and self-sufficiency—to ground a flourishing life in the midst of a flourishing garden.
Life in the Garden was not as you might imagine. Epicurus was content with bread and water and famously asked a friend to send him a little cheese so that, when he wished, he might feast. Far more important than luxury was friendship. ‘Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life,’ he wrote, ‘by far the most important is friendship.’
Time Made Visible
A garden is a microcosm of the outside world. Gardeners are acutely aware of the rhythms and cycles of nature: which flowers are in their prime, when to plant out the seedlings, when and how and how much it last rained. Just as music is time made audible, so the garden is ‘time made visible’ (Clive James).
Winter is difficult, yes because it is dark and cold, but also because time is no longer structured by a succession of flowerings and fruitings. Time becomes amorphous, to be entertained and endured rather than savoured and celebrated like the season of magnolias, cherry blossom, rhubarb, plums, or chestnuts.
More than just keen observers of time, gardeners are real-life Time Lords, able to speed up time by working in the garden, and, later, to slow it right down by sitting back and surveying the fruits and flowers of their labour. Some gardeners are even able to step out of time altogether, working year-round to create Arcadian moments of perfection.
But moments are all they will ever be. When you paint a picture or write a book, it is there for ever (and isn’t that just amazing?), but when you mow the lawn you have to do it all over again in just a few days’ time. The gardener is like Sisyphus, the mythological king made to repeat for all eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.
In his essay of 1942, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus concludes: ‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, he at the same time transcends it.
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