Gardens and Meaning

What does it mean for something to have meaning?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. We use the word constantly — a meaningful conversation, a meaningful relationship, a meaningful life — but rarely stop to consider what we actually mean by it.

For Viktor Frankl, meaning was fundamentally an existential question. In Man’s Search for Meaning, drawing on his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl argued that the search for meaning is one of the fundamental motivations of human life. Meaning isn’t necessarily some universal truth waiting to be discovered. Instead, it can be found in the work we undertake, in the people and experiences we encounter, and in the attitude we choose to take towards circumstances we cannot change.

Psychological researchers have approached the question from a different direction. Rather than asking where meaning comes from, they have asked what we mean when we say that our lives feel meaningful. Researchers including Frank Martela and Michael Steger identify three core dimensions: coherence, purpose and significance.

Coherence is the sense that our lives make sense: that our experiences, memories and circumstances somehow fit together into a comprehensible whole. Purpose is having something to move towards, a direction or intention that gives shape to our actions. Significance is the feeling that our lives matter; that our existence has some value and that we make some difference to the world around us.

These aren’t necessarily separate experiences. They overlap and reinforce one another. A life can have direction without making much sense, or make sense without feeling worthwhile, or be full of achievement without feeling significant. A life that feels meaningful seems to involve some combination of all three and I find myself wondering how gardens might contribute to that experience.

The places that become part of us

We rarely experience places as simple collections of physical objects. A garden might be a lawn, a few trees, some paving and a border. But ask someone about their childhood garden and they are unlikely to describe its dimensions or the placement of the plants. They might tell you about the tree they climbed, the smell of the roses, the place they hid, or the particular patch of lawn that was perfect for football. The physical garden becomes entangled with a life.

Environmental psychologists describe this relationship as place attachment: the emotional and psychological bonds that develop between people and particular places. A place becomes significant not simply because of its physical qualities, but because of what happens there and what it comes to represent.

Think about the ordinary rituals that take place in a garden. The chair where you drink your morning coffee, the path you walk down to hang the washing, the vegetable bed you tend at the weekend, or the tree planted when your children were born.

None of these things are particularly remarkable, yet, over time they become woven into the rhythm of a life. The garden becomes more than somewhere we happen to live alongside. It becomes somewhere through which we experience ourselves. This is one of the ideas at the heart of phenomenological approaches to landscape: a place is not simply something we look at, but something we inhabit and experience through our bodies, our memories and the passage of time.

We know a garden differently when we walk through it barefoot than when we look at it from a window. We know it differently in the rain, in winter, at dusk, or in the first warmth of spring. We know where the sun reaches in the morning, where the wind catches, and where the first snowdrops appear. Knowledge of a garden is accumulated through living in it. A garden becomes meaningful not simply because of what it looks like, but because of what it is like to live there.

This is perhaps why gardens can be such powerful repositories of nostalgia. A familiar path, a particular tree or the smell of damp earth can suddenly collapse decades of time. For a moment, the place seems to contain not only where we are, but where we have been.

The difference between having a garden and gardening

There is another distinction that seems important. We don’t simply experience a garden; we participate in it, to varying degrees.

A garden can give us beauty, atmosphere, memories and a shady place to relax, but gardening asks something of us. It introduces responsibility: something needs planting, something needs pruning, something needs watering. Some things have become overcrowded, some things have died, and something unexpected has appeared and perhaps turned out to be wonderful.

A garden constantly presents us with small problems that require our attention. This might sound trivial, but perhaps there is something significant about having responsibilities that are immediate, tangible and indifferent to our own importance. A garden doesn’t care what we do for a living. It doesn’t care whether we’ve had a successful day, or what anxieties we’ve brought home with us; the plants simply need watering. For a little while, our attention is directed away from ourselves and towards something else.

This feels close to Frankl’s understanding of meaning. Meaning isn’t necessarily found by turning inward and asking ourselves what our lives are for. Sometimes it emerges through our relationship with something outside ourselves: through what we choose to care for, what we give ourselves to, and what we take responsibility for.

Gardening offers a very small, very tangible version of this. We don’t have to know what our life’s purpose is before we can deadhead the rose; it’s simply something worth doing.

A garden gives us a future

Gardening also gives us a relationship with a future that is increasingly difficult to experience in a world built around immediate rewards.

We might plant bulbs in autumn for flowers that won’t appear until spring. We might plant a tree knowing that its mature form may be decades away. We make decisions whose consequences will belong, in part, to people we will never meet. In these ways a garden is always asking us to imagine something that does not yet exist.

This makes gardening an act of optimism, but perhaps more importantly, an act of commitment. We invest our attention in something without knowing exactly what it will become and the garden doesn’t allow us to have complete control over the outcome. The tree will undoubtedly grow differently from how we imagined. Certain plants will thrive where they weren’t expected (or wanted). Others will fail completely. Gardens don’t stick to plans.

Perhaps this is part of their value. Gardening gives us something to work towards without giving us complete control over what we will eventually achieve. It teaches us to participate in a future rather than simply predict it.

Between nature and design

There is a particular uncertainty that exists because a garden occupies an unusual position between the natural and the artificial.

A garden is not nature left alone, but nor is it simply an object that we have manufactured. We might decide where to sow the seeds, but the plants decide how (or if!) they grow. We choose the tree, but not the precise shape it will eventually take. We can do our best to create the conditions for life, but we cannot completely determine what happens within them.

A garden is therefore a collaboration between human intention and something beyond our control, making it quite unlike most designed objects. A chair does not unexpectedly produce another chair beside it. A wall does not decide to grow three feet taller. A building does not change colour in May and shed its windows in November. A garden responds; it changes; it exceeds the intentions of its designer.

Perhaps this is why gardens can become meaningful in a way that many other designed things cannot. They allow us to exercise agency without giving us complete control. We make decisions and we have to live with their consequences. We intervene, but we also have to observe. We plan, but we have to adapt.

So what does a garden have to do with meaning?

The question isn’t whether gardens have meaning, but whether they give us particularly fertile places in which to make it. Let’s return to the three dimensions of meaning:

Coherence – A garden connects different parts of our lives. It can hold our memories and routines, mark the passage of seasons and years, and become a physical thread running through different chapters of our lives.

Purpose – There is always something to do and something to work towards in a garden. There is another season around the corner, more seeds to sow, another small problem to solve. The garden gives us a future that requires our participation.

Significance – A garden allows us to see that our actions matter. We plant something and it grows. We care for something and it thrives. We create a place that is experienced and valued by other people. Our attention has consequences beyond ourselves, however small.

None of this means that gardens are a universal answer to the question of meaning, nor that everyone needs to garden in order to live a meaningful life. But perhaps gardens offer us a particularly tangible way of experiencing something that is otherwise remarkably difficult to grasp: that meaning is not necessarily something we find waiting for us; it can emerge through our relationships with places, people and living things.