13 Gardeners Who Planted Kindness and Harvested Happiness, From Tomatoes and Bees to Wildflowers and Pumpkins

Gardeners always grow more than they need, and the extra almost always turns into kindness: a bag of tomatoes on a porch, a jar of honey, a bundle of rosemary tied to a gate. The hobby gives back to the gardener, too. In a Royal Horticultural Society study published in the journal Cities, people who gardened every day had wellbeing scores 6.6% higher and stress levels 4.2% lower than people who didn’t garden at all.

From a grandmother’s tomato bed with a phone number hidden on a seed packet to beehives parked outside a nursing home window, these stories show how a simple vegetable garden can grow happiness for everyone around it.

• Mom spent her last spring teaching my 12 y.o. to garden. After she passed, I caught Dad digging in her tomato bed at 2 a.m.
  My daughter ran out with a seed packet: “Grandma said if he digs, call this number!”
  I called. A woman answered: “Don’t let him reach the roots. Please put him on.”
  The woman was Ellen, who volunteered with Mom at the food pantry. Dad had said he’d turn the vegetable garden back into lawn because he couldn’t manage it alone. Mom had written Ellen’s number on the seed packet under “Garden help.”
  I held out the phone. Dad told her: “I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d get it over with.”
  Ellen asked if she could come by in the morning. “Your wife kept bringing vegetables when I was out of work. A few of us offered to take turns here this summer. I should’ve called you sooner.”
  Dad looked at the plants he’d pulled up. “I don’t want people depending on me.”
  Ellen replied with a smile: “Then they won’t. Let us do the work for a while.”
  At nine, she arrived with two neighbors, gardening gloves and coffee. They replanted the tomatoes Dad had lifted and asked permission to come twice a week. My daughter showed them where Mom kept the twine. Dad stayed in the kitchen that first morning.
  On their next visit, he carried out three mugs. A week later, he asked Ellen to show him how to tie a stem without snapping it. By July, he was leaving paper bags of homegrown tomatoes by the gate for her pantry deliveries.
  He kept the split ones for our lunch. “Ugly ones taste better,” he told my daughter, cutting one into thick slices. That was Mom’s line. My daughter reached for the salt and moved her chair beside his.

• My grandmother’s nursing home in Yakima, Washington sits right next to an apple orchard. Last spring, the orchard’s beekeeper, Ruben, moved four of his beehives to the edge of the property, just outside the residents’ sunroom window. He told the staff it was for pollinating the apple trees.
  Then he started coming every Thursday to open the hives where the residents could watch through the glass. They named every queen. My grandmother’s is Bettina.
  In August, Ruben brought every resident a tiny jar of honey, labeled with the name of their queen.

• There’s a gas station off I-80 in western Nebraska with a strip of bare dirt between the pumps and the highway. The owner, Marjorie, planted it with wildflowers: coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and blanket flowers. Now truckers stop just to take pictures.
  Last summer, one of them left an envelope at the register with seed packets from 14 states and a note: “For your strip. From all of us out here.” She planted every one.

• Every morning at 7:15, an older man walks past our house, and every morning he used to stop and touch the rosemary bush by our gate. One day I asked him about it. His wife had grown rosemary for 50 years, he said, and he hadn’t smelled it since she passed.
  Now there’s a fresh bundle of rosemary, tied with twine, waiting on our gate post every morning before 7. He takes it without a word and tips his hat.

• A neighbor boy kept climbing our old apple tree to sneak apples. My dad could have yelled. Instead, he built a wooden ladder, leaned it against the trunk and hung a sign: “Pick what you need. Leave some for the next kid.”
  That fall, the boy left a note in our mailbox thanking him, signed with three apple stickers. Now he helps Dad prune the tree every March.

• Every August, my grandmother in Toledo, Ohio turns her cucumbers into 60 jars of dill pickles and gives every one of them away. She has one rule: return the jar with something in it.
  The jars come back with zinnia seeds, a recipe card, a $2 bill, and a crayon drawing of a pickle wearing sunglasses. She keeps everything in a shoebox on top of her fridge. Last week she showed me the box. It’s full.

• For 11 years, my neighbor Pearl and I shared one long raised bed that ran right along our fence line, her half and my half. She grew tomatoes and basil. I grew peppers and lettuce.
  Last spring, Pearl moved into assisted living across town. I couldn’t let her half go empty, so I planted it exactly the way she always did: Better Boy tomatoes in the back, basil along the edge.
  Every Sunday I bring her a basket from her side of the bed. She inspects every tomato and tells me exactly what I’m doing wrong. It’s the best part of my week, and the most happiness this hobby has ever given me.