10 Gardening Hobbies That Remind Us Growing Flowers and Plants With Your Own Hands Is Still an Act of Kindness

My mom left my brother the house and my sister the car. She left me her garden. I said things at that reading that I am not proud of. This summer I went to dig it all up, sell the land, be done with it. I grabbed a shovel and started on the flower bed nearest the gate. First dig hit something solid. A sealed jar wrapped in cloth, about a foot down in the soil.

Inside was money, more than I expected, and a note in her handwriting. It said: “I knew you’d come to dig it up. I knew you’d be angry. I left you the garden because you’re the only one who ever actually stopped to look at it. The money is for whatever you need. But before you sell it, dig up where the roses are. There’s another jar. And another after that.”

I found 4 jars in total, one under the rose bushes, one near the vegetable patch, one beneath the old lavender she had been pruning for twenty years. The last one had no money. Just a note that said: “You stayed long enough to find this one. That means the garden already did what I needed it to do.” I didn’t sell the land. I’m planting dahlias where I found the last jar. I don’t know what I’m doing yet but I’m learning. I miss her.

I’m 74 and I’ve been growing roses over my garden fence for thirty years. Last spring my new neighbor, maybe 30, came over looking embarrassed. He said one of my climbing roses had grown through his fence and his landlord was threatening to charge him for damage to the trellis. I went to look.

The rose had pushed through a gap and wrapped itself around his entire balcony railing in the most spectacular way I had ever seen a plant move. I told him I would deal with the landlord. Then I asked if he wanted to learn how to train climbing roses properly. He said he didn’t know anything about gardening. I said neither did I at thirty. He comes over every Saturday now. Last week he bought his first pair of pruning shears. I cried a little. He pretended not to notice.

My son came home at 8 with a bean seedling in a plastic cup from school. Standard science project. He was supposed to water it and observe. He took it extremely seriously. He made a chart. He moved it around the flat all day following the light. He talked to it. By week three it had outgrown the cup and he was devastated it would have to go back.

We transplanted it into a container on the windowsill instead. It grew runner beans all summer. He ate every single one standing at the windowsill straight from the plant. He is 14 now and has six containers on that same windowsill. The bean plant from the plastic cup started something I do not think will ever stop.

I live in a city apartment with no garden and no balcony and I had completely accepted that growing things was not for people like me. Then my building manager sent an email saying the rooftop was available for residents to use and did anyone want to start a communal garden up there. I signed up without really knowing why. There were 6 of us. None of us knew what we were doing.

We grew tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, courgettes that got completely out of control. We had a harvest dinner on the rooftop in September that eighteen people came to. I had lived in that building for four years and spoken to maybe three of them. The rooftop garden has introduced me to my neighbors in a way four years of sharing a lift never had.

When I retired, my colleagues gave me a garden voucher because someone had mentioned I liked plants. I had never actually gardened in my life. I used the voucher to buy raised bed kits, compost, and a beginner vegetable growing book because I figured retirement needed a project.

6 months later I was growing more vegetables than I could eat and leaving bags on doorsteps all down my street. A woman three doors down knocked to say thank you and mentioned she had been a professional horticulturist for thirty years. She has been teaching me ever since. My colleagues gave me a voucher. It turned out they gave me the next chapter of my life.

I started window boxes on my ground floor flat mostly because the street felt grey and I wanted color. Geraniums, trailing lobelia, petunias, whatever was cheerful and cheap. 3 years of this. Last month a woman rang my bell. She said she walked past my flat every morning on the way to work and had done for three years and the window boxes had become the thing that told her the season had changed, that summer was coming, that something was still growing and bright even in difficult months.

She wanted to know what I planted in the boxes because she wanted to try it herself. I invited her in and we spent an hour going through planting combinations. She sends me photographs of her own window boxes now. They are better than mine. I am very proud.

I got an allotment after my divorce because my therapist said I needed somewhere to put my energy that wasn’t my phone. The allotment next to mine belonged to a man in his eighties named Arthur who had been growing vegetables there for forty years. He never offered advice unless I asked. When I asked he was precise and patient and always right. I asked a lot.

By the end of my first season I had actual vegetables, more than I expected, potatoes, carrots, courgettes, kale I didn’t know what to do with. Arthur tasted a carrot from my plot and said “not bad.” I nearly framed the compliment. He passed away the following spring. I tend his plot now as well as mine. It feels like the right thing to do.

My daughter is 7 and last spring she asked if she could have her own bit of the garden to do whatever she wanted with. I gave her a raised bed and a packet of wildflower seeds and left her to it. She planted everything at once in one go with no plan, then watered it every single day with a dedication I have never managed myself. By July it was extraordinary, poppies, cornflowers, ox-eye daisies, completely chaotic and completely beautiful.

She started cutting small bunches and leaving them on neighbors’ doorsteps with notes that said “from my garden.” One neighbor, a woman in her 80s who rarely comes outside, started appearing at her gate on the mornings my daughter delivered. They have tea together now every Saturday. My 7-year-old wildflower garden gave an old woman a reason to open her gate.

I started making seedbombs last winter, wildflower seeds mixed into balls of clay and compost, the kind you throw into neglected patches of ground and forget about. I left them in empty tree pits, neglected verges, a particularly grim stretch of pavement near the bus stop I use every morning. By May, that stretch had poppies and cornflowers pushing through the gaps in the paving.

People started stopping to look at it on their way to the bus. Someone put a small hand-painted sign next to it that said: “Who did this, thank you.” I never claimed it. I just kept making seedbombs and finding new patches of grey that needed something growing in them.

My grandmother pressed a stem cutting of her pelargonium into my hand the day I moved into my first flat. She said pelargoniums are almost impossible to ruin and that this one had been in the family for 40 years. I stuck it in a pot of compost on the windowsill, forgot about it for a week, and it rooted. It has been on every windowsill I have ever had since. I have moved six times. It has come with me every time, repotted into slightly bigger containers with each move, flowering every summer without fail.

My grandmother passed away four years ago. Last spring my own daughter moved into her first flat. I pressed a stem cutting into her hand at the door and said pelargoniums are almost impossible to ruin and that this one had been in the family for 60 years. She stuck it in a pot on her windowsill. She sent me a photograph last week. It has rooted.

Has growing something in your backyard, on your balcony, or even on a windowsill ever given you more than just a plant? Tell us your story in the comments.

• 12 Handmade Moments That Teach Us One Simple Hobby Still Brings More Kindness Than the Internet in 2026