There was a time when my entire garden was a stoop.
A small landing outside my front door, a staircase, a few square feet of sunlight. For nearly ten years, that was my outdoor space — and I made it into something. Hanging baskets spilling over with flowers and strawberries. Pots crowded with basil and sage, with cherry tomatoes that somehow thrived against all odds. Every morning I’d go out and check on them, water them, note what had changed overnight. It was a ritual. A small, quiet, daily ritual that kept me tethered to something living.
And when grief came — and it did come, hard, when I lost Ginger, my soul dog — the only place I wanted to be was that stoop. Not inside. Not talking. Just outside, in the sun, feeling the wind move against my skin, smelling whatever was blooming. Just being. Present and small and held by something I couldn’t name.
I didn’t have language for what the garden was doing for me then. I just knew it helped.
And then came the years when the whole world contracted, and the stoop wasn’t enough because suddenly there was nowhere else to go. During COVID, with the outside world reduced to something I could barely access, my desire to be near living things went absolutely wild. I filled my living room with plants. Pothos trailing from shelves, ferns unfurling in corners, pansies in unlikely corners. What had been a home became something approaching a jungle, and I was not sorry about it. Each new plant felt sacred. A lifeline to something real, something that was still growing and reaching and doing what living things do, regardless of what was happening beyond the walls.
I still have some of those plants. They are huge now — unrecognizable from the small, hopeful things I brought home in those isolated days. I look at them sometimes and see not just plants but a record. Of where I was. Of what I needed. Of the fact that I kept reaching for life even when life felt very far away, and that the reaching was enough.
Starting From Scratch: Planting in Difficult Ground
My partner and I have lived in our current home for a little over two years. When we moved in, the backyard was all dirt — uneven, rocky, spacious in a way that felt almost overwhelming after years of stoop gardening and makeshift indoor jungles. But there were two raised beds already built in, waiting. I took that as an invitation.
That first spring I went a little wild. Three hundred dollars at the local garden center. Tomatoes, zucchini, rosemary. Lavender — so much lavender! Flower seeds scattered with optimism: zinnias, cosmos, creeping thyme, poppies. I put my hands in the rocky dirt and I started.
Most of the seeds, I should tell you, didn’t do much. I went absolutely berserk with them — packets and packets, all that optimism pressed into difficult ground — and what came up, reliably and joyfully, were the cosmos. Just the cosmos. Tall and feathery and blooming in pinks and whites and magentas all through spring, summer, and into fall. They brought me so much joy that I didn’t mourn the seeds that hadn’t taken. The cosmos were enough.
And then the following spring, without me doing a single thing, I had a field of them. They had self-seeded. The cosmos had decided, on their own, to come back.
This year it’s the borage — a whole row of them lining one side of the backyard, blue-starred and buzzing with bees, because they too had quietly self-seeded while I wasn’t watching. I have watered, I’ve amended the soil with worm castings and bone meal and fish fertilizer (and if you’ve ever used fish fertilizer, you already know: the smell is an act of devotion), and look at what has come from it. I walk through the garden some mornings and feel something I can only describe as parental pride. These plants. These ridiculous, generous, self-determining plants.
I’m in my third spring here now, and the yard I’m standing in barely resembles that bare expanse of earth we inherited. The lavender saplings I planted are now full grown bushes that need support stakes to hold their weight. My rosemary plant is as tall as I am. A mandarin tree gifted to us by a neighbor’s landlord is in the ground and pushing out beautiful new spring leaves. And every February, before Valentine’s Day, the jasmine I planted in year one begins to bloom — filling the night air with that particular musky sweetness that has become, for me, the smell of a season turning.
Borage, bishop’s flower, yarrow, nasturtium, milk thistle, arugula, radishes, kale, dill, basil, eggplant, jalapeño peppers, squash. Each year the garden gets a little more varied, a little more itself.
And each day, I go out and water every plant by hand. No sprinkler system. Just me, moving through the garden in the early morning or evening, noting what’s changed, what’s reaching, what needs attention. It is the most grounding part of my day. Hands in the dirt. Attention in the present.
What Grew When I Wasn’t Looking
But here is what I didn’t plant, and couldn’t have planned: the ecosystem.
Sometime in the past year, the garden started giving back in ways I hadn’t anticipated. The bees arrived first — fat, happy bees drifting above the cosmos and borage flowers, their legs packed with pollen like tiny golden saddle bags. Then the butterflies, gorgeous and unhurried, moving through the spring and summer air. And the birds!
I have one small bird feeder in the garden. What it has attracted is a daily miracle. Between four and five in the afternoon, the birds hold what I can only describe as happy hour — sparrows, Black Phoebes, mourning doves, all arriving to feast. When I added a bird bath nearby, they began to come for that too, drinking and splashing and fluttering in the water with a joy that is completely unself-conscious. I can watch them for hours. My dog Pepper holds a dedicated grudge against the very fat squirrel who also visits. The whole scene is alive in a way that stops me every time.
None of this was here two and a half years ago. This entire ecosystem — because that is what it is now, a real and functioning ecosystem — exists because someone decided to plant some flowers and squash.
I think about that a lot. How little it took to make something come alive.
What the Research Says, and What the Garden Already Knew
There is a concept in trauma research that I keep returning to when I think about my garden. Bessel van der Kolk, whose work on trauma and the body has shaped so much of how we understand healing, writes about the importance of survivors reclaiming a sense of agency — the felt experience that your actions have effects, that you can do something and the world will respond. Trauma, particularly interpersonal trauma, fractures that expectation at a deep level. When someone has been harmed by another person, the relational world stops feeling like a place where you can invest yourself and receive something nourishing in return. Care given doesn’t come back. Vulnerability is met with violation. The loop breaks.
A garden, I think, is one of the gentlest ways to begin repairing that loop.
You plant something. The world responds. Not immediately — and that slowness is part of the medicine too — but it responds. You put borage in the ground, and months later, bees arrive. You add a bird bath, and birds come to splash in it at four in the afternoon. The feedback is tangible and safe and completely unhurried. Nobody is asking you to perform wellness. Nobody is measuring your progress. You just show up, and the world, quietly, gives something back.
There is also something profound in the somatic dimension of gardening — in the literal, physical experience of hands in soil. Trauma lives in the body. One of the core challenges of healing is finding pathways back into the present moment, back into physical awareness, away from the dissociation and hypervigilance that trauma leaves behind. Gardening is one of the most natural of those pathways. You cannot be somewhere else when you are feeling the texture of soil, smelling jasmine, watching a bee navigate a flower. The senses pull you into now. The nervous system, so often held in a state of threat, begins to settle. Research in ecotherapy and horticultural therapy has increasingly documented what many of us have always known intuitively: that contact with living things, with soil, with natural rhythms, supports nervous system regulation and emotional wellbeing in measurable ways.
But you don’t need a study to feel it. You just need a pot and some sunlight.
You Don’t Need a Backyard
This is what I want to say to anyone reading this who might be in the middle of something hard:
You do not need a backyard. You do not need raised beds or a mandarin tree or three hundred dollars at a garden center. Maybe all you need is a pot. A windowsill. A small container of basil on a kitchen counter, something to water each morning, something to check on, something that will — if you show up for it consistently — grow.
Start with one plant. Something forgiving: basil, mint, a succulent, a pothos that will trail down from whatever shelf you give it. Go outside if you can, even if outside is just a stoop or a fire escape. Let the sun land on you. Let the wind move past you. Feel the temperature of the air. Notice what’s blooming or budding or already gone to seed. Let your nervous system remember that the natural world is still doing what it has always done, indifferent to whatever is breaking your heart, and somehow comforting in exactly that indifference.
If you have more space, use it. Raised beds, container gardens, window boxes, a community garden plot — each of these is a place where you can practice the thing that gardening quietly teaches: that small, consistent acts of care compound into something real. That the world, given the right conditions, will come alive around you. That you can put your hands into difficult ground and eventually, something will grow.
I sat on a stoop for nearly ten years and tended my little containers through grief and loss and the ordinary passage of time. I filled a living room with plants during the loneliest years any of us can remember. And now I stand in a backyard that hums with bees and fills with birds, and I know that the garden was tending me back, all along.
It will do the same for you.
If you’re curious about ecotherapy or horticultural therapy as healing modalities, a good starting point is the American Horticultural Therapy Association at ahta.org. For understanding trauma and the body, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score remains one of the most accessible and important entry points into this work.