Of Soil and Soul

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

--Poet Theodore Roethke

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Do you believe that getting your hands dirty planting petunias will sooth your soul?

If so, you’re not alone.

Next weekend visit a local nursery, notice the crowds and you’ll know there’s a movement afoot to--as Joni Mitchell’s early ‘70s song “Woodstock” pleads --”get ourselves back to the garden.”

“People are realizing when we garden, we’re doing a lot more than just lawn maintenance,” said Judith Handelsman, author of the book “Growing Myself, a Spiritual Journey Through Gardening” (Dutton, 1996).

“We are nature [ourselves], looking after and tending nature, and that not very complex act somehow takes on a spiritual and healing overtone,” she said.

What happens when you garden, or even when you just spend time in the garden? Experts note many positive effects, among them:

* One hour in the garden will reduce your blood pressure the same as if you had meditated for that hour.

* Numerous hospitals and correctional agencies that have gardening programs report dramatic decreases in violent and antisocial behavior when gardening is part of the program.

* Gardening is the one art that stimulates all of the senses: You can smell, touch, see and taste plants, and hear them blowing in the breeze.

* Physiologists report heightened muscle relaxation, slower breathing and increased endorphin production among gardeners.

* Psychologists say self-esteem, patience levels and generosity are boosted when people garden.

Said simply: If you want to increase joyful feelings in yourself, find a garden.

“It’s hard to quantify joy, peace and serenity in a scientific sense,” said Sarah Conn, PhD, an eco-psychologist who teaches psychology at Harvard Medical School. Eco-psychology is a burgeoning field that studies human mental and emotional health with regard to things such as gardening, prayer, star-gazing and marathon running.

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“Nature and plants are relatively indifferent to humans, so there’s no performance anxiety, no stress,” Conn said. “That’s why people like to hang out in gardens so much.”

Handelsman said most people intuit this, and that’s why gardens and gardeners can be found in both Versailles and South-Central Los Angeles.

“This might sound dramatic, but I think people realize things are disconnected and have concluded it’s either transform or die,” she said. “And they’re reaching out to something very basic to help them do that: gardening.”

Gardeners agree on this: Tending plants teaches one about the true rhythm of life; that it can’t be forced, only nurtured.

“One of the most difficult aspects of my job is trying to sell the concept of a time lapse,” says Sarah Munster, a Los Angeles landscape designer for 10 years. “Particularly here, where the perception of time is instant and so many people think in terms of illusion.”

Munster said she often will not hear from clients until a year after the garden is planted, and then comes the ecstatic call. “They’ll usually say they can’t believe it,” she said, “ ‘It looks so beautiful,’ almost as if they couldn’t accept it until they saw the results.”

She believes that one reason gardening slows us down is that gardens can’t be hurried.

At the heart of gardening is the feeling that one is dropping a timetable constructed around dental appointments, car maintenance and freeways to enter a realm of unlocked time.

“[In gardening] people plunge headlong into a world entirely outside their control,” noted Anna Pavord, a British gardening writer. “This, of course, is not a conscious feeling. When I wander out the back door to do some casual gardening, I don’t say, ‘Fancy that. I’m part of the great diurnal round.’ I just get on with the weeding.”

But with the absorption comes the notice of nature: the shrub in the dusk, the lavender in the light, “and that’s the added dimension gardening adds,” she said, “that you’re actively involved in the process. It’s like the good book and unlike TV.”

“Gardens are also a place of refuge, a sanctuary from the profane world,” wrote Julie Moir Messervy, author of “The Inward Garden: Creating a Place of Beauty and Meaning” (Little, Brown; 1995). “And most important, perhaps, a garden is a place in which to reckon with our inner being.”

There’s something about a garden’s silence, psychologists say, that lowers the level of self-chatter, allowing the inner eye a more unobstructed view of what’s really going on inside.

“I always tell people that I really just provide the environment,” said Ginni Larson, head of the horticultural therapy program at the University of Minnesota. “I just bring people to the soil and let the earth do its own magic.” She said that this therapy without words--like art, dance or music therapy--can be very powerful as it touches right-brain emotions.

Katherine Sneed, a counselor with the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, is founder and director of the San Bruno Jail’s Garden Project, an organic gardening and therapeutic counseling program that gives inmates the opportunity to both grow gardens and sell what they till. The effects, Sneed said, are profound.

“Gardening changes the picture they [the inmates] have of themselves,” she said. “When they see beautiful roses, lettuce, peppers that they’ve grown with their own hands, there is self-worth: ‘I did this.’ ”

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Sneed tells of an 18-year-old crack addict with 3-inch-long fingernails. “Within only two weeks, she had cut off the fake nails and begged to stay working through the weekend. She told me when she took the garden’s vegetables home to her grandmother, it was literally the first bit of praise she remembers receiving.

“The garden helps them understand they can have a sense of control over their lives. If they plan, tend, water and persist, then can make their lives grow according to a plan. Sometimes, this is the only place they can ever learn that concept.”

“Gardens are also the great leveler, the great diffuser,” said Kelly Ball, a gardener of 20 years living in Venice. “I like to say that gardens appeal to communists and fascists alike. Extremely different types of people can and sometimes do enjoy the same garden. How often does that happen in life?

“People aren’t angry very long in gardens,” he said. “And they aren’t angry about gardens. People can get angry about animals; people even get angry about the air. I think it’s one of the few things people agree on: Gardens are good.”

“Most souls are defenseless against a garden,” said Yana Rusika, a landscape artist in Laguna Beach. “The magic in a garden can’t be bottled. And it’s not just a soul healer, but also a physical healer.” Rusika said that when the ancients were sick, they walked in tree groves and rose gardens and breathed fresh air.

Today, formerly sterile hospitals are picking up on the ancient idea.

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The USC / Norris Cancer Hospital has a 9,200-square-foot meditation garden, the Sherry Hinderstein Meditation Garden, thought to be one of the largest such hospital gardens in the country.

The garden’s donors, Howard and Beverly Hinderstein, hope the place, with its white spire birch trees, jacaranda, floss silk and Hong Kong orchids, will be an oasis for those whose lives have been hurt by cancer. Howard Hinderstein, 70, lost his daughter, Sherry, and his granddaughter, Alyse, to the disease, and recently his wife, Beverly.

Hinderstein remembers when he and his wife would visit their daughter, they found no place for repose. “I like to take people to the spot we had available to us,” Hinderstein said. “It was a tiny smoking area, with overhead air conditioning making just enough noise to keep you alive.” He says when he learned that Norris was planning a garden, “I knew it was Sherry’s.”

The West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Hospital has its own garden therapy program. Started in the 1970s by Vietnam veterans, the Vet’s Garden occupies 15 acres of the hospital grounds.

Sponsored by the American Horticulture Therapy Assn., a national organization of health practitioners who promote the therapeutic benefits of horticulture, the garden allows patients to plant and care for their own gardens.

Some of the plants grown by the patients are basil, mint, rosemary, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, peaches, plums and nectarines. Individuals and restaurant owners regularly buy the crops.

Patients say they find something in the garden that many veterans find elusive. “The garden’s helped me be at peace with myself and move on with my life,” said Al B., a former patient at the hospital who asked that his last name not be used. “It has taught me to accept people unconditionally, just for what they are--sick or happy, sad or laughing.”

Ida Cousino, a West Los Angeles therapist and head of the Vet’s Garden program, said that even the most severely disturbed psychiatric patients, who respond to little else, react positively to the garden therapy. Patients are calmer, she said, and outbursts and violent incidents are dramatically reduced.

“No one is saying the garden has made them completely well,” Cousino said, “but without question you can see the difference it makes. The patients know they come here to work, which gives them a sense of purpose and self-worth.

“They grow and nurture life, something powerful for these particular patients,” she said.

So, if you would like to get in touch with your kinder, gentler side, the plant kingdom can help. Just as working with anything else perceived as smaller and in need of nurturance (children and animals, for example) releases a nurturing side in a nonthreatening way, tending plants helps people, experts say.

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Said Ball, the Venice gardener: “Plants help me see any little barbarian sides of my personality. If I’m not gentle, if I’m ripping away at the plants, it stands out. And I can translate it into my outside-the-garden life.”

Handelsman agrees: “The interconnectedness of all life does not have to be an abstract concept. We can live it. It doesn’t matter whether we garden indoors or outdoors; we can honor our world. It is all a prayer.”