Why Everyone should have a Garden

For many, a garden or any vegetation, for that matter, is inconsequential to their daily lives. They simply exist on the periphery of their lives, perhaps bringing beauty but not much else, and to many, they are seen as a burden. For me, I take a different approach, and maybe it’s just the lessons about growing your own food or having something fresh that I got from my mother, but gardens harbor so much more. They are full of lessons, whether that’s learning to be patient because the blossoms don’t come on day one or that’s being connected to nature and understanding that each plant impacts what’s around. These lessons can be applied to really anything in life, from relationships to business. They are simply models, and you can get so much from them.

People's main opposition to starting a garden is often that they don’t have a green thumb or don’t have the time, but the reality is that they spend time maintaining green lawns or scrolling aimlessly, so it’s really not that; they don’t really value them. Gardens were once a source of food and enjoyment, but now they are reserved for the elderly or for leisure. But let’s get back to the lessons we can glean from them.

Your first instinct, or maybe the only lesson you could think the garden will teach you, is about nature. How to connect to the earth? What a certain vegetable or fruit looks like as it grows, or maybe even what its blossom smells like, These are all great starting points, and they are certainly the most observable lessons. It will help you connect to nature in ways you probably wouldn’t guess, and it can and should bring you joy. However, these natural lessons are quite narrow. You aren’t probably noticing the natural competition of plants or how you can shape a plant to be the way you would like. You might notice that if you water a certain way or if you add too much fertilizer, you will have a specific outcome. These are all great lessons, but I am thinking a bit more abstractly here.

To me, a garden is a good analogy for economics, and there are actually a lot of lessons about economics you can learn from a garden. I mean, think about it: economics is just how to organize scarce resources, or so that’s what they teach you in the intro courses. But I am getting ahead of myself… So what could possibly be learned about economics from a bunch of plants that just happen to grow? Well, you can think of the garden as an economy. You have flowers or fruits, which can be compared to the products or goods produced. You have the leaves, or the actual plants, which are the literal assets of the economy, which is the garden. You have the water, the fertilizer, the dirt, and the sunlight, which are the economic inputs.

Taking it a step further, on the macro scale, a garden with limited diversity of plants is a boring garden and not that productive, much like an economy with only so many industries or assets, and this limits the growth and overall desirability of the garden. If one plant has too much power in the area—call it a monopoly—then the garden will fail, and if you have too much fertilizer or regulation, then the garden will overcorrect for outcomes you may not like. Economies like gardens are a delicate balance of inputs, outputs, supply, and demand. Too much correction can be bad. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, and sometimes a plant can take over everything. On a micro level, a plant, like a firm, can be shaped and molded to maximize the output and increase the fruits. Likewise, allowing a plant to dry up or allowing a pest to overrun the plant will likely kill the plant. The best option is to create resilient plants and put in place systems in which plants cohabitate and feed off of each other, allowing the entire garden to flourish on a macroscale. Ultimately, a good garden is a system of good balance and diversity of plants. An economy also needs a good balance and a diversity of firms to allow it to flourish and reach its full potential.

When you grow a garden, however small it is, you are learning to balance these systems, which is an effective way to improve problem-solving skills. Things that are worth waiting for take time, and most things around us are systems, and there are multiple ways to effect systems. You can increase or decrease something. Making gardening is a good way to learn about leverage, or cause and effect. Ultimately, a garden is so much more than vegetation or the peripheral beauty of life. It is life and its many challenges actualized in a system that you can play with and apply its observations in your own unique way to make it work. It connects you to the dirt from which we come, and it will change the way you see things in this life. Not only that, but if you spend enough time in it, you just might find that it is a great way to get away from many aspects of life and live.

If you take anything from this, I hope it’s that everything around us has something we can learn from and that you should grow a garden. Even if your version of that garden is simply a collection of potted plants on your balcony or a half-acre plot, It’s not about the size; it’s about taking any small amount of potential and turning it into little growths of joy and lessons. It’s about connecting to nature and drawing parallels to things around us. Most of all, it's the seeds you and others sow that produce the great blossoms that can make the world a beautiful place.

Stay growing!