13 Gardeners Who Proved Kindness Has a Long Growing Season: a $1 Sunflower Row, a Pizza Garden for a Retirement Home and Car Keys in the Vegetable Patch

Every gardener has a story about something they planted for someone else. Sometimes it’s a row of sunflowers, sometimes a pot of herbs, sometimes a single dollar. And the time spent in the soil may help the gardener, too. In a study published in the Journal of Health Psychology, gardeners who did 30 minutes of gardening after a stressful task saw their stress hormone cortisol drop more than people who spent the same time reading, and their good mood came all the way back.

From a $1 row of sunflowers that was never really rent to a pizza garden planted for a retirement home, these stories show how this hobby turns kindness into happiness.

• For 8 springs, my 81 y.o. neighbor paid me $1 for one row of my garden. She grew sunflowers, then cut every one before it bloomed.
  After she passed, her daughter handed me an old voice recorder. I pressed play. My late mom’s voice said, “That dollar was never rent. It was for your garden. You’ll want to stop planting after I’m gone. Nobody quits a garden when someone’s paying for a row.”
  I sat down on the porch steps. Mom had passed away in March, just before that first growing season. Our neighbor, Mrs. Abernathy, had been her best friend for 30 years. I’d always thought the $1 deal was just a sweet old woman’s quirk. Out of habit, I’d kept every dollar in a coffee can.
  The recording paused. When Mom spoke again, she was addressing her friend. “And the sunflowers aren’t for her. Cut them as the first yellow petals start to lift and take them to the hospice. They’ll finish opening in the vase. There were no flowers in my room until she brought some.”
  Her daughter explained the rest. Mom had given Mrs. Abernathy the recorder with one instruction: “When you can’t tend the row anymore, give her this.”
  Every August for 8 years, Mrs. Abernathy had wrapped the sunflower stems in newspaper and driven them to the hospice where Mom spent her last weeks. The nurses called her “the sunflower lady.”
  Mom was right about me, too. That first spring, I didn’t want to plant anything. But someone had paid a dollar, so I tilled the bed. And once I’d prepared her row, I planted mine.
  This spring, I planted her row myself. In August, I cut the sunflowers as their first petals began to lift. I called the hospice to ask whether I could continue her deliveries, then drove over. The nurse at the front desk looked at the armful and smiled. “You must be the new sunflower lady.”
  That night, I added a 9th dollar to the coffee can. This one was mine.

• My mother-in-law and I never really got along. Then, after her knee surgery last May in Evansville, Indiana, she called and asked, very stiffly, if I could help stake her tomatoes. I almost said no.
  I went over every Sunday all summer. She taught me how to tie the vines loosely so they wouldn’t snap. I taught her how to use the voice-to-text feature on her phone. Somewhere between the tomatoes and the text messages, we started laughing.
  Now we garden together every Sunday, and her knee has been fine since July.

• Our fifth-grade class wanted to do something for the retirement home down the street, so we planted a “pizza garden” in the schoolyard: tomatoes, basil, bell peppers, onions and oregano. The kids watered it all spring.
  In September, we harvested everything, and the retirement home’s kitchen staff helped the kids make 20 homemade pizzas for the residents. One resident, who’s 96, told the kids it was the best pizza she’d had since 1952. The kids wrote that number on the classroom whiteboard, and nobody has erased it.

• Every Saturday at our farmers market in Lawrence, Kansas, one vendor sets out a crate with a sign: “Ugly but delicious. Free for college students.” It’s full of crooked carrots, cracked tomatoes and lopsided squash that won’t sell.
  My roommate and I lived off that crate our whole sophomore year. When I graduated, I went back to thank him. “My grandpa did the same thing for me in 1979,” he said. “Somebody’s got to feed the next round.”

• On the first day of school, my daughter’s first-grade teacher gave every student a bean seed in a cup. By June, the vines had climbed the classroom windows. On the last day, the class saved seeds from their bean pods and gave one to every kindergartner, so next year’s first graders would start with them.
  The teacher has done it for 11 years. My daughter’s bean has great-great-grandchildren now.

• Every October, a retired couple outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, opens their small pumpkin patch for one Saturday, just for foster families. Every child gets to pick a pumpkin, ride the hay wagon and take home a caramel apple.
  Last year, 60 kids came. One foster mom told them it was the first family tradition her kids had ever had.

• After his surgery, my dad couldn’t go outside anymore, and his favorite hobby had always been his vegetable garden. I posted on a gardening forum asking how to grow cherry tomatoes indoors.
  Update: I got more than 200 replies. Following their advice, I set up two dwarf tomato plants and a small grow light on his windowsill. In July, Dad picked his first cherry tomato from his chair. He ate it, closed his eyes and said, “Now it’s summer.”