Front Porch: Gardening provides stash of fresh food, mental health boost

On television in mid-June, I saw an interview with British actress Helen Mirren, who has done rather well lately portraying queens on stage and in film. She commented that she always plants things wherever she is but often doesn’t get to see them bloom because of her travel schedule.

What an optimistic thing that is. And when I did a little research, I came across a statement she had made earlier: “Gardening is learning. That’s the fun of them. You’re always learning.”

I’ve written before how I am late to the garden party, having just begun to enjoy its pleasures many years after my hair turned gray. For all those decades before, that whole grubbing in the dirt thing seemed like so much needless bending and digging, weeding and watering – and all just to produce a couple of tomatoes or a flower or two (provided the deer didn’t get them first), both commodities which were readily available at the grocery store. I mean, why bother? I never begrudged anyone his or her gardening pleasures; I just didn’t see the appeal.

I wish I knew how or why I turned the corner. Seems like one spring I just decided to plant a couple of geraniums. They were pretty in their pots, so why not. But as we live on a hill with lots of pine trees and little open sunlight, I ran into trouble with other things I tried. And then there were the deer.

So I did research, which I enjoy, and came up with solutions, some of which worked and, of course, some of which didn’t. And I asked people who knew more than I did (which was pretty much everyone). I thought I could outsmart the deer by hanging a tomato plant in one of those green upside-down planters by my front door, one of the few places that got some reliable sun. And gee, it was growing great, so great that one morning I came out and found the deer had come up the steps during the night and stripped it naked.

I have come up with more practical solutions. Anything that I will eventually want to eat (tomatoes) I now plant in containers on the back deck, which is high off the ground – I’m on a hill, remember, and the land slopes down fairly steeply behind my house. Safe from deer (and, sadly, absent steady sunshine), but not safe from squirrels … I’m working on that.

I spray my flowers with a nasty homemade concoction I keep refrigerated until needed, and I try to plant flowers deer are said to not like. I have found, as has everyone before me, that when so moved, deer will eat anything. But if I can get my flowers to the end of September, I figure it’s OK for the deer to swoop in and munch at will. They need to fatten up for the coming winter, and I’ve had my season of enjoyment.

But the question of how the gardening gene got turned on still eludes me. Cicero said “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Well I do have a pretty good library at home and do like to read, so maybe I’m becoming a more complete person.

Lots of famous celebrities, likely and not, garden – designer Dianne von Furstenberg, country singer Blake Shelton, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, Beatle Ringo Starr. Maybe I’m just getting with it, finally.

I’ve discovered that for centuries gardening has been proven beneficial for those with mental illness, documented in the 1700s by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the man considered to be the father of American psychiatry. After World War II, hospitalized war vets achieved improved rehabilitation through gardening. It’s been shown to be helpful for prison inmates, as a community building activity and is considered generally therapeutic for just about anyone who partakes.

Perhaps I was just in need of a mental health boost and instinctively knew this was good for me.

Or maybe I tasted my first home-grown tomato, and the deliciousness of it convinced me that some of that grubbing in the dirt wasn’t so bad after all.

But no matter the cause. Here I am, by no means particularly skilled, but enjoying the little bit of gardening I do, and as Helen Mirren said, learning more as I go. And then there’s this. Not quite as lofty as Cicero’s observation, but a sign I saw sums it up perfectly: Gardeners know all the dirt.