A note before you read 🌱

This one's a little different from my usual ReGrounded parenting content - it's a talk I gave to a local garden club, and a few of the lovely ladies asked me to write it up. So, here it is.

It's written for adults rather than kids, and it's less about parenting and more about what gardening does to us - how it quietly shifts our relationship with time, with place and with nature itself. But the thread running through it is the same one that runs through everything I do here for parents: that reconnecting with the natural world starts not with doing more, but with seeing & thinking differently.

If you're a gardener, I hope it gives your practice a little more meaning. And if you're not - well, there might still be something here for you too.

- Jess 🌿

Let me start by telling a story about one of my all-time favourite audiences: a group of Grade 1 students.

I had ended up there because my sister’s son’s school was kicking off a “caring for the environment” module, and they were looking for anyone who worked in the environmental space to come and speak to the children. My sister promptly volunteered me, and there I was, standing in front of a group of six- and seven-year-olds, all fidgety and restless on the floor in front of me.

I told them that I’m a philosopher, which is not exactly something most six-year-olds have heard of. So I explained it like this.

I said, “Do you all think it’s important to be kind?” and they all nodded.

Then I asked, “And when you grow up, do you all want to be like superheroes, like the good guys?”

Again, a chorus of yes.

So I said, “Well, philosophers ask really big questions. Questions like: what does it mean to be kind? And what does it actually mean to be the superheroes, or the good guys?”

Then I told them that I’m a particular kind of philosopher: an environmental philosopher. And that environmental philosophers ask questions like: what does it mean to be kind to the planet? Are we being the good guys in our own story?

I explained that philosophers do not do experiments in laboratories like scientists do. Instead, we do what are called thought experiments. So I invited them to put on their imaginary philosopher hats and join me.

And then I explained one of the foundational thought experiments in environmental ethics: the story of the last man, conceived of by the environmental philosopher Richard Routley.

In the original version, we are asked to imagine that all human beings have been wiped out in a global apocalypse, except for one man: the last man. Don’t worry - for the six-year-olds, I adjusted the story a bit. I did not tell them to imagine that everyone had died in an apocalypse… I told them instead that a giant spaceship had come and fetched everyone, but that one man had overslept and missed it.

The thought experiment then asks us to imagine that the last man spends the rest of his days destroying everything left on Earth. Mountains, rivers, forests, anything he can, he destroys.

The question is this: is what he does wrong?

You see, the reason this thought experiment became so foundational is that many traditional ethical theories had difficulty explaining wrongdoing unless some human being was wronged. But in this case, there are no humans left to be affected. And yet many of us still feel strongly that what he is doing is wrong.

So I asked the children, “Is what he does wrong?”

“Yes!” they shouted.

“Why?” I asked.

One child said, “Because he would hurt the animals.”

Ah, I said, that’s a great answer. And it is actually one branch of environmental ethics: animal ethics, the view that holds that it is morally wrong to cause harm to a sentient creature.

Then I said, “Okay, but imagine the spaceship came back and fetched all the animals too. Now he’s just destroying the oceans, beaches, forests, mountains, and deserts. Is what he does still wrong?”

“Yes!” they shouted again.

“Why?”

And one child said, “Because he’s ruining all the pretty places.”

Another fantastic answer, and actually another branch of environmental ethics: aesthetics, the view that beauty has intrinsic worth.

Then I asked one more time, “Is there any other reason why what he does is wrong? Anything that gives you an icky feeling in your tummy when you think about it?”

And one little girl in the front, who had been quiet until then, put up her hand and said, “Because it’s our home.”

And I could have just melted.

Because the truth is that one of the deepest problems of modern life is that we are starting to feel less and less like the Earth is our home. That deep sense of belonging, connection, and appreciation for the natural world as home has been quietly eroded by capitalism, consumerism, and Western modernity more broadly.

How We Got Here

There has been a very noticeable spike in recent decades in depression, anxiety, ADHD, stress, and overwhelm. I do not need to defend that. It is widely recognised.

But what I think is far less often said is that one of the root causes of these symptoms is our growing disconnect from nature.

The more we separate ourselves from the natural world, and rip ourselves away from a sense of connection and belonging that had kept us rooted since the birth of humankind, the more we leave ourselves restless and rootless in a way that is profoundly damaging.

The story of this disconnect is not difficult to trace. It was accelerated by industrialisation, by the rise of mechanistic science, by the idea that man should triumph over nature, and even by a certain interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the one that says that man should have dominion over nature.

For centuries, that verse was often understood in the West as granting mankind a God-given right to exploit and use the natural world for human purposes. There are, of course, other interpretations of that verse, ones that suggest we should instead see ourselves as guardians or custodians of the natural world. But historically, the interpretation that placed humans in a posture of domination and control was the one that prevailed.

Even now, many well-meaning phrases and pieces of advice can unintentionally reinforce this separation.

We are often told to “spend more time in nature”, and of course I agree with that. But the way it is often phrased implies that we need to leave home and enter Nature, with a capital N, as though it is somewhere out there, over the hills and far away. A place we go to visit and then return from in order to continue with our normal lives.

But the problem with that view is that it subtly encourages us to see ourselves as separate from nature. It makes it seem as though nature is a place we visit, rather than a world we belong to.

What we need instead is to recover a sense of ourselves as part of nature in an everyday-sort-of-way. In our ordinary, daily lives. We need to re-ground ourselves, to re-embed ourselves in the natural world.

So how do we begin to do that? How do we begin to repair this disconnect that has become so characteristic of modern culture?

So What Can We Do? or Mindsets for Meaning

To clarify at the outset though, I do not suggest that we can, or should, escape modern life entirely. There are many good things that have come with the advancement of civilisation. I am not suggesting that we run off into the woods, throw our smartphones into a river, and abandon everything.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist and writer on indigenous ways of connecting to nature whose work I admire deeply, speaks beautifully about how we are harnessed to this economy in ways large and small. In other words, it is not really possible to remove ourselves entirely from the society and culture we inhabit.

So if we cannot abandon modernity, and do not even really want to, then the question becomes this: how else might we start to live differently?

How might we reconnect in ways that begin to repair this severance between the way we think and feel, and the natural world?

This is where I like to talk about what I call mindsets for meaning.

By this, I mean mindsets that we can add to things we are already doing in our daily lives. How can we think differently so that we begin to feel differently about the world around us?

And so, for gardeners, my question is this: if you are already gardening, what can you add to that practice that allows you to experience it with more connection, wonder, gratitude, and appreciation? How can you add a layer to your gardening that enriches the experience and allows it to become an avenue for deeper reconnection with nature?

If you are already doing it, how can you simply change the way you think about it so that you get more out of it?

I suggest that there are three broad ways in which gardening can do this. It can change our relationship with time, our connection to place, and our relationship to nature itself.

Lets look at them in turn.

1. On Time: Nature Doesn't Hurry

Modern life is intensely linear. It moves forward in one endless stream. Your inbox is a nonstop flood of messages. Messages come and go. Tasks follow tasks. Modern life is not marked by pauses so much as by constant continuation.

Natural time is different. Earthly time is cyclical. Seasonal. It is marked by rhythms and returns. It is interrupted, necessarily and beautifully, by signs of change. There are meaningful thresholds and benchmarks that ground the year in a tangible change of pace and environment.

And when you garden, you may not always realise it, but you are living more seasonally. You begin to appreciate the slow signs of change. You notice bulbs emerging and retreating as temperatures shift.

You start to track signs that many people no longer see. In that sense, gardening draws you into a way of living that is more rooted in seasonality than the average modern life tends to be.

That is no small thing.

It is something to appreciate, and perhaps even to be grateful for. It means you are already living with a degree of seasonal awareness, and that is deeply grounding.

For centuries, human beings marked time through rituals tied to the earth: harvest festivals, first-fruits celebrations, seasonal gatherings. In her lovely book For Small Creatures Such as We, Sasha Sagan (daughter of famous cosmologist, Carl Sagan) reflects on the power of these kinds of rituals, and on the way they once anchored time for us. They gave the year rhythm, repetition, and meaning. They brought people together and reminded them where they were within a larger cycle.

We have lost much of that. But gardeners still live with some of it. You still know the joy of the first flower of spring, or the first sign of a winter plant emerging. You still live by these small returns, whether or not you consciously think of them that way.

You still know the particular joy of the first bloom of a flower in spring. You still notice the reappearance of winter plants. You still live, to some extent, with the earth’s own calendar.

So that’s one way in which gardening implants something meaningful into our relationship with time.

Gardening also shifts our relationship with time in another crucial way: it reminds us that nature cannot be hurried.

I have a quote up on the wall in my dressing room from Lao Tzu that I love: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

That captures it beautifully.

No matter how much you want something to sprout faster, grow faster, bloom faster, you cannot rush it. And this stands in such sharp contrast to modern life, which is all about immediacy, speed and instant gratification. Everything is faster. Everything is expected now.

Maybe it’s just me- but if something, like an app on my phone, delays for even a fraction of a second slower than I’m used to, I feel irritated.

A garden pushes back against that. It slows us down.

I’ll share a story about this from my own life. I am not an especially skilled gardener, and my gardening method is often closer to throwing seeds at the soil and seeing what happens, hoping for the best. Whatever grows, wonderful. Whatever does not, apparently was not meant to be.

So, I have attempted some vegetable gardening with my three little children. And one of the first things we did was plant carrot seeds. I remember reading the back of a carrot seed packet and saw that the time from planting to harvesting was 90 days. NINETY DAYS! I remember thinking: like, whatttt? I have to wait NINETY DAYS for carrots?

It felt absurdly slow.

We planted them anyway. We also, as a side note, made the beginner’s mistake of planting only one batch instead of sowing sequentially, so we got one harvest rather than a rolling supply. But that one harvest was still wonderful.

There is something magical about watching your child grab the green tops and pull a carrot from the soil. Seeing their excitement.

And the point is this: it taught me, and it taught them, that nature does not work on our timeline. It cannot be hurried.

Gardening teaches us, again and again, that some things simply cannot be rushed, and they’re all the better for it.

2. On Place: Putting Down Roots (Really)

Another thing gardening does is reconnect us to place.

Modern life, similar to how it revolves around speed, is increasingly built around replaceability. Things are designed to be interchangeable, disposable, easily swapped out for the next better, shinier thing.

Gardening does the opposite. It binds us to a particular place, to THIS patch of earth, this corner of ground, this small piece of the world that has received our care, attention, hard work and time.

Because when you plant a seed, or a seedling, you are in a sense making a tacit promise to the earth. You are saying: I will be here when you grow. I will water you, feed you, prune you, care for you. I will see you through the seasons.

That kind of commitment to a place is deeply grounding. It roots you here, in this actual patch of ground.

It creates attachment not in the abstract, but in the literal and material sense of caring for a specific patch of the world.

In fact, there are two phrases that take on a lovely double meaning when we think about gardening in this way.

The first is putting down roots.

Usually we use that phrase metaphorically, to describe building a life somewhere, establishing belonging, friendship or community. But putting down literal roots do exactly the same thing. When we help living things stretch and wind their way deep into the earth, they create connection, stability and belonging for us too.

As the actual roots of the plants we tend to deepen, something in us deepens too. So when we garden, we are, in both senses of the phrase, putting down roots.

The second phrase is surface level.

We all know what it means to have a surface-level relationship with something. It means a shallow, superficial one.

I think there is something profoundly true in the literal version of that as well. If we only ever move across the surface of the earth, then our relationship with it remains surface-level too.

But when you break the soil, when you get your hands into the ground, when you move beneath the surface, your relationship changes too. It becomes far richer and more connected than a simple, surface level one.

I think there is something profoundly true in the literal version of that as well. If we only ever move across the surface of the earth, then our relationship with it remains surface-level too.

Overall, I think both of these result from another powerful element of gardening: its tangible nature.

Gardening restores something that many of us are missing, namely the satisfaction of hands-on labour. These days, the fruits of our labours are often not fruits at all. They are emails sent, files stored in the cloud, tasks completed in virtual space. Much of what we work for no longer has a physical or sensory form, and so it does not affect us in quite the same way.

Gardening gives us that back.

I have another story which illustrates this for me personally.

A few years ago, I completed my PhD in philosophy on the role of the environment in human flourishing. By the end, my thesis was tens of thousands of words long, built on more than a decade of study, and the final act of submission… well, it involved hitting ‘send’ on an email.

Backtrack a couple of years and I had been volunteering on organic farms in Ireland. One misty Irish morning, I was told to dig up a patch of ground at the back of the farm. Now, I am not very practiced at manual labour so I’m not particularly graceful at it, but there I was, shovel in hand, digging and digging. And out came potatoes. Actual, whole POTATOES! Covered in rich, black soil.

At the end of that day, I looked down at my muddied hands, the hole in the ground on my left and the pile of potatoes I had gathered on my right. And I can honestly say that I felt more satisfied in that moment, than I did when I’d hit send.

Something happens to us when we join with nature in the magic of turning seed into plant into food, into flower. We become co-creators in a process that is deeply tangible, and something in us responds to that.

Gardening also trains our powers of attention.

I know this because my mother, who is a truly skilled gardener, takes us on what we call the garden tour every time I visit. She can point out the smallest changes. What has just bloomed. What is thriving. What has newly sprouted. She knows the garden with an intimate, intricate level of detail... She notices everything.

In a world constantly fighting for our attention with things that are louder, brighter, faster, and more stimulating, gardening asks something else of us. It asks us to notice small changes, slow changes, quiet changes.

In a world constantly competing for our attention with things that are brighter, faster, and flashier, that kind of attention is increasingly rare.

And increasingly precious.

And that, too, is part of what gardening does. It makes us notice.

We can even add one further layer of meaning to this. Not only should we notice, but we can begin to think differently about that which we are noticing….

Gardening, if we let it, can invite us to begin seeing what grows not merely as produce or output, but as gift.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about this in The Serviceberry, where she explores what changes when we learn to regard the offerings of the earth as gifts rather than merely resources. As she says, “When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes”.

Yes, we do participate in the growing, gardening process. We tend, water, weed, prune and care. But by and large, we do not make the magic happen. The life in the seed, the transformation, the growth itself, is something larger than us. Something gifted to us by the earth.

That reframe move us towards something more balanced, grateful and reciprocal.

3. On Relationship: From User to Partner

Lastly, and connecting beautifully to the last point above, gardening in fact changes the way we relate to nature more generally.

It moves us from the position of detached consumer or user into something more relational and participatory. It invites us into partnership. When we garden, we become co-creators with the earth and its living soil (*actually, as I typed that last word, ‘soil’, I mistyped and wrote ‘soul’… but maybe that wasn’t much of a mistype after all*).

So, as I’ve mentioned, I’m not quite a gardener. I’m just not in a season of life at the moment where I’m able to give much time to gardening amidst the beautiful chaos of three little kids. But I experienced this in a different way a few years ago when I was lucky enough to be volunteering in the Karoo on a land restoration project.

We were there planting spekboom in areas damaged by soil erosion. We would take these half-blunt machetes, hack down thorn branches, and brush-pack around the base of these newly planted spekboom stems in the soil. The logic was that either grazing animals would eat the thorns themselves, or they would be deterred by them, either way leaving the little spekboom alone long enough for it to establish strong roots.

And so there we were, carefully placing these spekboom stems into the ground. And it was such a tender act, such a caring act. And yes, human hands had led to the erosion in the soil where we found ourselves, but human hands were helping to restore it as well. It was really just a beautiful moment of tending and care.

Another standout memory from that experience was that one night we decided not to head back to camp, but to sleep at the restoration site. So there we were, sleeping bags only, no tents. And it was quite something to lie there under skies so dark that the entire Milky Way shone through.

We had tried to use the brush-packing method to keep ourselves safe that night as well. We had cut down thorn branches and packed them around our sleeping bags. And we woke up in the morning to find ALL of the brush packing gone, replaced instead with buffalo prints in the sand.

Needless to say, we were very lucky that night. And I definitely waited a few years to tell my parents that story.

Back to the point though - this relational partnership that we engage in with nature when we garden and when we grow things is actually captured beautifully in indigenous philosophies. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time working on indigenous African environmental ethics, and I’ve even published a few academic papers looking at these ideas.

I’m sure all of you here have heard of the concept of Ubuntu, which says “I am because we are.” And that encapsulates the view that you cannot flourish individually, that you can only thrive as a human when you contribute to and participate in the collective flourishing of your community.

And so, in order to flourish, you need to help your community to flourish. That’s what Ubuntu captures.

What’s less known is that Ubuntu is actually a subset of a broader relational idea called Ukama. And Ukama holds that yes, we can only flourish as people if we focus on the flourishing of other people, but also the flourishing of the non-human world.

Ukama says that we actually live in deep relationality with the human and non-human world, including rivers, mountains, plants and animals. And that in order to truly flourish and thrive, we need to ensure the collective, harmonious flourishing between all entities and creatures.

And so Ukama is a really beautiful idea that gets to the heart of a relational perspective.

It also captures something important, which is that our Western idea of wilderness is often very exclusionary.

These views often regard the human as tarnishing or tainting nature with its very presence. So we think about protecting wild spaces as those places untouched by human hands. We all know the adage when visiting nature of ‘take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints’.

By and large, yes we should of course try limit harmful impact, but if we tarnish nature with our very presence, then we have no place to be at home on the earth either. The environmental philosopher William Cronon famously criticised this tendency, noting that it leaves us with what he called a “self-defeating counsel of despair”.

Whereas relational philosophies, like indigenous philosophies, like the African concept of Ukama, recognise that we can live in relation. We do belong here. We just have to live in a way that is balanced, harmonious, and in deep partnership.

We’ve already spoken about some of the ways that gardeners enact this in especially concrete ways.

As another example, you know more than most what it means to partner with other living creatures.

If you think about the average modern, Western person, their exposure to animals or wildlife might be through a pet, a cat or a dog. Otherwise, they’re not coming into much daily contact with other non-human living creatures.

Whereas you, as gardeners, know far more acutely that we are constantly within a web of relations between insects, birds, butterflies, bees. You see how the grubs in your soil help to enrich it, how the birds feed on them, how the butterflies and the bees come to your plants to pollinate, and so on.

So you, as gardeners, really are embodying this kind of co-relational web, a partnership at a much deeper level than many others experience.

What It All Adds Up To

So those are the three layers in which gardening can change the way that you’re actually engaging with the natural world.

It changes our relationship to time, drawing us into a more seasonal, cyclical engagement with time.

It changes our connection to place by drawing us into a deep partnership and connection with the actual place on which we tend our gardens, giving us a stronger sense of rootedness and groundedness.

And it changes our relational dynamic with nature, shifting us from being merely consumers and users to partners in the cycles of growth and renewal.

That, I think, is a really lovely thing.

Finding our way home again

So I hope all of these mindsets will be ways that you can add layers of meaning to your gardening practice as you’re already doing it, and that you can start to think about gardening in a slightly different way.

That it can help you to enjoy it more, to get more out of it, and to slowly find yourself in a way that feels more rooted, more grounded and less restless and disconnected than we often have become.

Perhaps we are, in some quiet way, homesick.

We have lost something of our sense of home, our homeliness, our felt bond with the world that holds us.

And perhaps practices like gardening, when entered into with the right mindsets, can help us find our way back.

Because, as that little girl reminded me right at the beginning, this is our home.

I'm exploring the idea of a simple monthly 'meaning-booster' where I'd send you one short video and a written reflection, each focused on a single idea for more intentional, connected gardening.

Think of it as a gentle monthly inspiration: one concept to sit with, explore and bring into your garden and your life more deeply.

Topics would cover things like seasonal rhythms, what it means to tend rather than consume, the philosophy of place, and the wisdom of relational traditions like Ukama, and plenty more.

If there's enough interest, I'll put together full details - including details on how it would work - and send them through to everyone who signs up here.

No commitment at this stage. Just curiosity.