10 Home Garden and Landscaping Habits That Are Usually Set to Guide You Toward Real Discipline and Personal Growth Ahead of 2027

The growing season is winding down fast, and what someone does with these last few weeks in the yard says more about their habits than any New Year’s resolution will come January 2027. A peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology this past February found that gardening done consistently, not just when the weather’s nice, actually strengthens people’s sense of security, identity, and mental wellbeing, with researchers drawing a clear line between gardening as real discipline and gardening as an occasional chore people abandon once it gets inconvenient. With 2027 closing in, the beds tended through this final stretch of fall are quietly setting the tone for habits that either stick or don’t. These home garden and landscaping moments prove real personal growth usually starts with dirt under someone’s nails during the weeks nobody feels like showing up.

My new neighbor, Denise Harlow, 52, came over for coffee at my place in Columbus, Ohio. I went to the bathroom and when I came back she was photographing my garden. She put her phone away the second she heard me. That night I set up a camera. I saw her at 3am with a scanning detector. Turns out, she grew up in my house.

I confronted her the next morning, footage and all. She went red and apologized. Back in 1989, her mom lost her wedding ring while planting tomatoes in the backyard. They searched for weeks and never found it. Her mom is 84 now, and her memory is going, but she still asks about that ring. Denise had bought the house next door to be closer to her. She’d been photographing my garden to compare it with old family photos and figure out where the tomato patch used to be.

“I didn’t know how to ask a stranger if I could dig up her yard,” she said and also apologized. That weekend, we searched together with her detector. We found the ring under my rose bed, about a foot down.

• My neighbor, Eleanor P, 73, has the most beautiful garden in our Asheville, North Carolina, neighborhood. I asked her secret once. She said, “I talk to them.” I laughed because it sounded funny. Last month, she knocked on my door at dawn. Her rare roses were gone, dug out overnight, the holes filled in and raked smooth. Everything else was untouched. “I lost these once before,” she said. “40 years ago, my husband tore them all out, drunk and grieving. I saved cuttings and started over.” Her garden had been in a magazine that spring. Police said a plant theft ring had hit 3 other gardens in the county that month. Weeks later, they found 2 of her roses at a nursery two states away. She’s starting over again from those two. “They’re quiet for now,” she told me. “They just need time to trust a place again.”