17 Gardeners Whose Hobby Grew More Than Flowers — From a Mom’s Will Under Baccara Roses to a Grandmother Who Beat Retirement Loneliness

Curiosities
10/26/2026
17 Gardeners Whose Hobby Grew More Than Flowers — From a Mom’s Will Under Baccara Roses to a Grandmother Who Beat Retirement Loneliness

Gardening is the one hobby that gets better the more of it you give away. A study indexed on PubMed Central found that older adults who garden at home or in community plots reported enhanced self-esteem, productive endeavors, and social engagement.

For some, a home garden is where the loneliness of retirement quietly loosens its grip, one seedling and one shared basket of tomatoes at a time. Here are 12 gardeners whose kindness, compassion, and hope turned flowers, compost, and wildflowers into unexpected happiness.

  • Mom’s will gave my brother the farmhouse. He’d been living there with his wife and 2 kids since Mom got sick, and she didn’t want her grandchildren to lose their home. I understood that.
    What I didn’t understand was the next line — I only got her 6×8-foot black rose “garden,” by the back fence. They were Black Baccara roses, a red so deep they look black in the evening light. Mom planted them the year I left for college. Everyone thought they were gloomy. She used to smile and say, “That’s why nobody bothers them.”
    My brother laughed when the lawyer read the will."Clear your weeds off my land by Friday," he smirked, “We’re putting in a patio.” I was hurt, but I didn’t argue. I just wanted to save a few of Mom’s roses.
    The next day, he called me, his voice completely different. He offered me $25k to leave the garden untouched and never come back for it. That’s when I knew something was wrong. My brother didn’t have $25k. He’d been borrowing money from Mom for years.
    So I dug anyway. Under Mom’s blackest rosebush, the oldest one in the corner, was a metal box wrapped in plastic. Inside were savings bonds and cash, about $48,000 in total, and a note in Mom’s shaky handwriting:
    “If your brother stops you, it’s because he found my diary. I hid this here because he’s in debt, and I was afraid he’d lose it all. The house is for the children. This is for you. But if you can, help him without making him feel small. He’s still my boy.”
    I sat in the dirt between the black roses and cried for an hour. Now I understood what she meant: she’d chosen the one flower nobody would ever want to touch.
    Later, I learned the truth. My brother was 3 months behind on a loan he’d taken out against the farm. He’d been planning to dig up the garden himself once I was gone, hoping to find whatever Mom had hinted at in her diary. He was scared, not greedy.
    I could have kept every cent. Instead, I drove to his house, sat at Mom’s old kitchen table, and paid off his overdue payments in front of him. I only asked one thing: that he get help with his debts, and that the roses stay. He broke down in my arms like he did when we were kids.
    There’s no patio now. Every spring, my brother and I prune Mom’s Black Baccara roses together while his kids run around the little garden she loved.
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  • I drive the 14 bus. 6 years now. At the Elm St stop theres a strip of dirt where people drop their gum wrappers and bottle caps, and every morning the same guy, Delroy, 70-something, stands there complaining about it to nobody.
    So one day I tossed a packet of wildflowers (cheap mix, $2, cosmos and California poppies mostly) onto it. I didn’t say anything. 2 weeks later: green stuff. A month later: flowers. Orange poppies, pink cosmos, one lone cornflower that I think was a mistake. And bees. Actual bees at a bus stop.
    Delroy now brings the lid of his thermos and waters the strip before he gets on. He told me he used to ride the 14 just to hear somebody say good morning. I say it twice now. Last week he let the bus go by so the flowers could get an extra drink.
  • I’m on the landscaping crew at the county hospital. Mostly I mow. A nurse stops me by the loading dock and says there’s a woman on the fourth floor who hasn’t left her bed in two weeks. She used to grow dahlias, forty varieties, the whole backyard. She asked what the lawn looks like from up there. It looks like grass. Flat, green, nothing.
    So at 6 a.m. tomorrow I start mowing the grass differently. Not rows. A heart, sixty feet wide, in two shades of grass: one cut at three inches, one at one. It takes me until noon. My supervisor walks by, sees it, and says nothing, which for him is a standing ovation. Our landscaping contract doesn’t include hearts.
    At 12:15 a curtain moves on the fourth floor. Somebody waves. By Friday I have eleven requests from other patients: a dahlia, a sun, a baseball. Nobody trained me in compassion. I just have a mower.
  • Holding my trophy and pride! (For reference I am 180cm/5’11)
  • Quick backstory: I live in a 24-unit building where in nine years nobody has said more than “hey” in the elevator. I got tired of it.
    So I started a little container gardening thing in mismatched mugs on my windowsill, mostly so I’d stop buying herbs. Mint, basil, one very dramatic parsley. Whenever somebody new moves in, I leave a mug on their doormat with a sticky note: “Welcome. Don’t overwater.”
    Results so far:
    31 mugs given out
    19 still alive (I check, because container gardening in a mug is harder than it looks)
    1 tenant who cried in the hallway
    A Sunday potluck that now takes over the third floor, which is against the lease, and nobody cares
    I’m not saying a mug of mint fixed loneliness in a 24-unit building. I’m saying kindness travels well in a coffee mug, and the elevator is louder now.
    Apartment 4C moved out last month and left the mug on MY doormat with a note: “Pass it on.”
  • 8 pounds, 13 ounces! I’m so proud of this one! This is an Ekimo cabbage, a similar variety to napa. It’s the only one to survive the in-bed planting I planted mid summer during our heat wave here in Colorado. Bugs ate all the others before I started spraying it with (vegetable safe) neem oil. I have a bunch more that I started in a greenhouse, and they are now planted and doing very well.
    Edit: I made pork and cabbage with half of it, and I’m making kimchi with the 2nd half.
  • I retired from the school district in June after 38 years as a school secretary, and nobody warns you about the quiet of retirement. For four decades my phone rang every four minutes. By August, the only voice in my house was the weather lady on the radio. Call it what you like. I call it loneliness, and I’m not too proud to say it.
    In September a tomato plant came up in the crack in my driveway. I didn’t plant it. A bird, probably. I’d never done any gardening in my life (my husband handled the yard), but I couldn’t walk past it. I started watering it every morning with a coffee mug, in my robe, and yes, I talked to it.
    The neighbor boy who skateboards and has never once said hello stopped to look. “Is that a tomato? In the driveway?” By October, he’d named it Kevin and brought two friends.
    A woman walking her dog asked to take a photo. Seven neighbors I’d lived beside for twenty years stood on my driveway arguing about whether it would ripen before the frost. It did. We split eleven cherry tomatoes on paper plates, and I’ve never known so much happiness over so little.
    We’re ordering seeds for spring now. I haven’t told anyone yet, but I’m pricing a raised bed. Retirement didn’t come with a handbook. It came with a tomato plant in my driveway crack.
  • Our mailman, Walt, retired in June after 31 years on the same route. In July, at 11:20 a.m., exactly when the mail used to come, he knocked on my door holding a zucchini the size of a baseball bat. “From my home garden,” he said. “Thought you’d want one.”
    He grows tomatoes and squash in five-gallon buckets in his driveway, some container gardening he started because, in his words, “retirement is just the same route with no mail.”
    Every weekday at 11:20 he pulls a wagon down the old route. Not to every house. Just the ones where he knows somebody’s home alone. He calls it exercise. I call it an act of kindness with a wagon.
    He still checks my mailbox out of habit, finds it empty, and hands me a tomato to make up for it.
  • By far my favorite flower ever. I could sit and stare at it all day. The second year of my “Midnight Tryst” hibiscus blooming. ❤️
  • I own three compost bins, and my wife has asked me to stop calling them “my babies” in front of company.
    Last spring my daughter’s best friend Mia came over crying because the storm had washed out her family’s garden. Everything. The soil too. Her dad had built two raised beds himself and now they were mud and 2×4s.
    I said nothing, loaded forty buckets of my compost into the truck, and drove it over. Mia’s dad stood in the driveway looking at the buckets like I’d brought him a kidney. “It’s just compost,” I said. “It’s six years of your coffee grounds,” he said, and I realized he wasn’t wrong, and I had never been prouder of a pile of garbage.
    They replanted in 2 weeks. The Kentucky Wonder pole beans came up first, and Mia sent a photo captioned: “Your babies grew mine.”
  • I spent 42 years in landscaping, designing gardens for people who could afford to have someone else enjoy them. Courtyards for law firms. A rooftop for a hotel. I was proud of the work, and in the way one is proud of work done at a distance from other human beings, I was not especially happy.
    When I entered retirement, my wife suggested I design something for myself. I could not think of anything. I had not expected retirement to be so quiet, a quiet that, if pressed, I would call loneliness.
    What I did instead, one Monday in March, was notice the woman at the front desk of my laundromat, whose building has no yard whatsoever. We had spoken, over the years, perhaps twice. I asked whether she would like a home garden. She laughed. Then she saw that I had brought a tape measure...
    We built 8 planters from salvaged pallets along her parking strip. I drew the plan on a paper towel. She planted marigolds, kale, and an extraordinary amount of cilantro.
    I have designed landscaping worth several hundred thousand dollars. This one, which cost $62 and a paper towel, is the only one I have visited 11 times.
  • My grammy’s stunning hydrangea bush she’s so proud of!
  • So this is gonna sound lame but I spent my entire sophomore year eating lunch in the school greenhouse because the cafeteria was, like, a lot. Nobody told me I couldn’t.
    Ms. Hakim, the bio teacher, never said anything. She’d look up from her trays of seedlings and nod. Once she handed me a tomato seedling and said “babysit this.” That was the whole conversation.
    By spring I had a whole row. Then another kid started showing up, then another. We don’t really talk, we just do gardening stuff next to each other. But last week one of them asked what time I was getting there tomorrow.
    I used to think loneliness was something that happened to other people. Honestly, the greenhouse is the first place I’ve felt anything like happiness since seventh grade, and I hope summer is short.
    There’s a sign-up sheet on the greenhouse door now, and Ms. Alvarez let me write the title: LUNCH CLUB.
  • We couldn’t afford flowers for the wedding. My mom had passed the year before, and I had the budget of a student, which is what I was. I’d made peace with no bouquets. I mentioned it to my grandmother, offhand, on the phone.
    The morning of the wedding, 9 women from her garden club showed up at the church at 6 a.m. in nine different cars, all in their seventies and eighties.
    Each one had cut flowers from her own home garden that morning: peonies, sweet peas, a bucket of hydrangeas, and dill because “it looks nice.” They spread newspaper on the church floor and made bouquets by hand, arguing about ribbon.
    23 arrangements of mismatched flowers in jars and buckets. I counted. That was the day I learned kindness can smell like peonies... I’ve been to expensive weddings since. None of them smelled like somebody’s wet garden at 6 in the morning, which is how I know ours was the real one.
  • Very proud of my onion I grew! I work at a restaurant and took home a few onion pieces three years ago this season. I grow them ornamentally at this point but will clip the smaller shoots off for cooking.
    About 4-5ft tall now! This is me sitting on the ground.
  • For 3 summers I fought a squirrel over my alpine strawberries. Netting, cayenne, a plastic owl named Gary. Nothing worked. My raised bed looked like a tornado went through it.
    Last June my neighbor’s 8YO studied the situation and said, “Why don’t you just give him his own?” So I put a pot of strawberries by the fence. A little container gardening, for the squirrel.
    I haven’t lost a berry since. He sits on the fence and eats his while I eat mine, like we’re on a very quiet date. I did not think kindness would work on a squirrel, but here we are.
    The 8YO gets invited to Thanksgiving now. Gary was retired with honors.
  • When we bought the house next to Mr. Kowalski, he was 84 and his backyard was a small farm: 6 raised beds, a grape arbor, pole beans climbing over what used to be grass before he gave up mowing it.
    His knees had made it clear that one person couldn’t do it anymore. He never asked for help. He just stood at the fence every morning watching us, with a look I can only describe as hope in a flannel shirt.
    My wife finally said, “Do you want a hand?” He said, “No.” Then he said, “Maybe a little.”
    We work on his home garden together now, 3 evenings a week. He sits in a lawn chair and supervises. We keep half of what we grow, and he keeps half.
    I’ve learned more about tomatoes from him than from any video, and I’ve learned that the loneliness he never mentioned was in the way he cleaned his tools twice. Call it compassion if you want. Honestly, the happiness in that yard is almost embarrassing...
    Last week he handed me his father’s trowel and said it needed a new owner. I told him it needs both of us.

Has gardening ever helped you through a lonely stretch, and what did you grow?

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