Here’s a charming message I received from a reader after she read the article Top 10 Reasons to Garden that appeared in this blog on March 7, 2021.
Enjoy!
Hi Larry,
I just discovered your blog and I must comment here…
I became a gardener last spring thanks to the pandemic lockdown. My mom, who had been tending our garden for 30 years, had eye surgeries last April and could not work in the garden. Also, she no longer enjoyed gardening and only saw it as a chore for the last few years.
Then the lockdown here in Slovakia happened and I was stuck at home working from a home office with nowhere to go and not much to do. So, I looked around and saw an opportunity… And I never looked back!
A year later I am in love with gardening more and more every day. I am now fully rejuvenating and re-landscaping my mom’s 0.3-acre garden that, it turns out, was quite tired and neglected. In the process, I’ve been giving myself a crash course on horticulture, making things tidy and beautiful again, bringing more life and color to our environment and, most importantly, I found incredible peace, joy and stress relief in working in the garden.
While other people around me are stressing out and feeling a lot of anxiety around Covid-19, vaccinations, politics, etc., I am planning what to dig out and what to plant where and when.
Gardening is the best therapy. It’s been almost exactly a year since I planted my first plant in the garden and I feel like a changed person—so much calmer, more productive, happy, proud of myself. I really recommend to anyone who has the tiniest plot of dirt around their house to plant something. It might change their life!
So happy I found your helpful blog, I will be reading it from now on.
Nad’a Clontz
Star Tura, Slovakia