Garden Rant cultivates readers who have a thirst for gardening and an appreciation for outspokenness. Good writing draws curious readers, but signs on the horizon don’t look promising. Doomscrolling may be hampering the future of gardening.
Merriam-Webster describes doomscrolling as: “to spend excessive time online scrolling through news or other content that makes one feel sad, anxious, angry…”
The Cleveland Clinic explains the causes and effects of doomscrolling.
Wikimedia Commons, Donald Trung Quoc photo
Americans have dug a big hole
Children are hooked on computers and smartphones, and there is no evidence that this makes any of us happier.
According to Wired: “… the average age at which American children receive their first smartphone is approximately 10.3 years old.”
Doomscrolling, social isolation, and loneliness have become the birthright consequences of not-likely-to-make-you-happy-on-smart-phones.
Wikimedia Commons, Japanexperterna photo
And you thought the internet, smartphones, and social media were a distraction
Ross Douthat wrote a recent opinion piece about the potential perils of Artificial Intelligence in the New York Times:
An Age of Extinction is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.
…Unless the true A.I. doomsayers are correct, in the year 2100 there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books.
But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices…the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master…
Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.
Árpád Cserépy (1859–1907), “Children playing”
Push kids outdoors
The constant management of activities represses imagination. Children need free-play moments to explore wild places or even the end of the street.
My mother threw me out of the house after summer meals. (Kitchens were tiny in the late 1950s for two reasons: cost and mothers didn’t want their boys and girls underfoot all day long.) I played in the woods with other children. There were noble attempts at building crude tree forts. Rickety bridges made by a posse of neighbor boys washed away time after time. Most of our energy was spent on patrol, crisscrossing our territory day after day.
“Lucky Dogs” by Adrian Tomine
Our world of unintentional, free exploration extended little more than a couple of blocks, but it was a wide and wonderful world to a six-year-old.
This was my pathway to gardening.
It took a while.
I couldn’t train English ivy up a wall in my early twenties, but was still prone to adventure, even more enthusiastic about wild places, and understood the risks of going out on a limb.
My first garden mentor
During college in the mid-1970s, I lived on a farm, near Mount Lebanon in Jessamine County, Kentucky, with four housemates and a single landline that seldom rang. It was high time – yes, it was—to sow tomatoes and green beans and plant my first garden. Elsie Lowery, a farmer, neighbor and good man, offered to plow our first garden. He never looked skeptically at any of us long-haired boys. We helped Elsie, and his brother Lavert, hang hand-cut stalks of burley tobacco—for curing—along four ascending rails in a tall, black barn. It was hard work. Elsie was as respectful to us as we were to him.
The location of my first garden, an oddly-shaped design, and ONE very long row to hoe.
Elsie Lowery
Old copies of Organic Gardening, found in a used bookstore, became more sustaining than Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb” that first winter. I had a vision of a rectangular 30-foot by 40-foot garden of mixed vegetables with some marigolds and zinnias tossed in, too. What Elsie gave us was an oddly-shaped garden—three feet wide by four hundred feet long— on the far side of his burley tobacco field. It was a long row to hoe—week after week—in an inaugural gardening season of triumphs and failures.
Gardening is complicated. So is life.
Over 50 years later, various gardens of mine have become better understood, but life is no less complicated.
News is no longer limited to the top of the hour. It is now, anytime of day, hard to escape the lack of dignity and pervasive polarization. Social media is a doomscrolling hellhole.
Hope for the future of gardening. Molly Bush and Story May Lowe in the Kentucky countryside in 2009. There is no suffering from doomscrolling in 2025.
My prescription for sufferers requires more time outdoors, supportive friends and family with moments of joy, sweet joy.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
Neko Case, the singer-songwriter, wrote on Substack last week: “Joy means a lot of things to me; interest, engagement, a sense of belonging, being useful and helpful, ridiculousness for its own sake…”
Elsie Lowery, a joyful man, never knew the perils of doomscrolling.
Elsie would have been too busy with the farm, family, and church anyway.
Holly Cooper’s big patch of winter aconites on March 9th. She brought seeds for me on Easter Sunday. Holly, my sister-in-law, is a terrific gardener.
I found joy last week, on my hands and knees, crawling slower than evolution, sprinkling hundreds of tiny round seeds of winter aconites around the garden.
Lucky dogs and doomscrolling indeed, good stuff. Love Elsie, finding Organic gardening. I remember being lost in granddaddy’s tobacco with my Elsie, Volnie Sparks, in Martha (Marthie) Kentucky. And Sarvis Tree vased behind the pastor waving his Bible in Sandy Hook circa 1957 at age of 9.
Andy, the sarvis (service) trees were beautiful a few weeks ago. Lucky dogs we are!
longer bloom than usual here in Cleveland OH area
Ours are just starting here in Maine.
Kris, I hope you have the beautiful spring you deserve.
Wow. My thoughts exactly. I took Facebook, Instagram and the like off my phone a few years ago to avoid falling down the rabbit hole and only rarely go to those places on the computer to see pictures of the grandchildren. Then I am out of there. Some time ago, many of the Jewish religious schools here made contracts with parents to only use cellphones which lacked the “smart” features such as internet access. This is for both children and parents, who only have them if they need them for work. Hasn’t seemed to hurt the education , any, and they function very well. Some business offices have gone smart phone free and have reported big increases in efficiency, as employees are not distracted. Good to see that people are becoming aware of what a problem these distractions are. We raised our kids without TV similar to the way my Mom raised us. She allowed very little television, maybe a half hour a day, if that. Our children were outdoors most of the time, running, playing, reading books in their favorite quiet spots, and so were their peers. Didn’t seem to hurt them any, and they developed great social skills.
Abby, good for you! I’m trying to keep my IPhone turned off as much as possible. It’s not easy.
Great read. Wondering if Jerry Smith, a previous roommate of yours, may have planted an early yen for growing things?
Medwick, it’s hard to imagine Jerry growing anything, but be did move to the country, and that seemed unfathomable in the 1970s.
Thank you Allen, wish we lived closer or that our lives had crossed earlier in life. I have no doubt that we would have shared many glorious times exploring nature, sowing gardens, and reveling in the absolute awesomeness of the world. Always enjoy your contributions. The next time you wander out to the Pacific Northwest I would love to meet you in person.
Thank you, Steve. From my woods to yours, very best wishes.
Thanks for evoking memories of my wild childhood spent outdoors in Northern Ontario, where my family owned an old farmhouse on a lake. My father was a professor of biology at the University of Illinois, and our place in Sundridge, on Lake Bernard, was mostly a biology field station and primitive camp. I don’t remember any television at all. My dad rigged up a swing that he tied to an old willow tree that we spent hours swinging on, over the creek. My grandmother had a raised bed flower garden made from an old rowboat, and I helped my dad grow vegetables in our garden patch. This experience set up my love of both gardening and giant zucchini jokes. Good times! No scrolling whatsoever.
What wonderful memories, Tove. Good times, indeed.
Well said Allen. I always get a chuckle while waiting somewhere to see everybody in the same head position scrolling on their phones. No one seems to enjoy people watching anymore or just observing. It’s the standing joke around here that if you want to get in touch call Dad as Mom’s phone is off. I’m okay with that as there’s much more interesting stuff going on all around. What a treat to get Aconite seeds. Hope they bloom and bring much joy.
Thank you, Elaine. I was thrilled the Easter bunny brought me hundreds of seeds of winter aconites.
A gentle anecdotal rebuttal:
While there certainly is a problem with people substituting online life for real life, and a resulting epidemic of loneliness, I have to push back on the “take away their phones and send them outside” solution.
I think I “did all the right things” to get our only child interested in the outdoors, gardening, nature, hiking, wildlife, anything. I tried not to force it on her -let her choose a flower to plant, a veggie to grow and eat, which trail to hike, gave her free rein in the backyard. We met up outdoors with young friends all the time.
At 15 she has developed absolutely zero interest. None. Turns out that her world is internal and fantastical, and also made up of cultures from the other side of the world, accessed via the accursed internet on her phone (given her at age 13). Her best friend has been obsessed with plants from birth, but not even peer influence will lure her into growing things.
She has no interest in putting her hands in the soil and has killed every houseplant put in her care, but she will cover her hands in clay, paint, graphite, or ink, or use them to create a digital animation of a story she invented in her head. She and her dad share a rich -and hilarious- cultural interest based on digital media, books, and ancient cultures alike. None of it lures them outdoors.
So… I accepted years ago that she was not a mini-me, and that kids who don’t like gardening or getting almost-lost in the woods can grow up to be healthy and well adjusted.
I know my kid at least had access to outdoor experiences and that is different than most kids, many of whom probably don’t have a lot of options to get outside and stay there. But for some people, even kids, their natural, comfortable environment doesn’t involve a lot of dirt, nor anything green for which they are personally responsible. I’ve had to learn to accept that even in my own family. I might need to do more gardening and less doomscrolling, but some people are actually okay with their digital diets.
Jenn, thank you for your gentle rebuttal. Clearly we can’t convert all children to gardening anymore than we can turn all adults into gardeners. It’s impossible. Your daughter sounds lovely, and full of interests. Who knows, she may come around years from now. After all, I didn’t plant my first garden until I was twenty-one.
a very timely Rant. we are creating a generation (or two) of timid, programmed people by not allowing our children freedom to explore. they are shoved into daycares (highly regimented), only allowed formal “play dates” and taught that the world is a dangerous, scarey place. In my own neighborhood I encountered a boy about 9 walking a dog on the sidewalk. He said, “arent you surprised to see me out here”? I said I sure am. A future leader with parents who allowed him to take the dog for a walk by himself in a quite safe neighborhood! I encourage everyone to watch “Old Enough” a Japanese TV series which illustrates that some countries actually cultivate responsibility, freedom of movement including crossing busy streets to very young children. Gardening is just another component of this “stay home and hide behind your screen”
Sally, it’s interesting that you saw a young boy walking a dog unaccompanied. Today, I saw a young girl bicycling on her own in rural Kentucky. I was so surprised I pointed her out to Rose as we were driving to Louisville.
Roaming your territory. I love that image. Yeah, we roamed back then, didn’t we?! Always pushing the boundaries on our fat tired Huffy bikes with one speed. Gardening bit me as a kid as well. Dad gave me a small bed alongside the house, but Miami is a tough environment to grow stuff as I recall. The parents were originally from Connecticut and mom always dreamed a Pacific NW style garden in her head. She got her wish when we moved to Anchorage, Alaska in 1970. Our summers with very long daylight hours give us a garden in 2 months that takes a lower 48 garden all summer to attain. It blows up into a jungle in a few weeks time. And nature sits waiting quietly to take over if you blink. Not just the 1 ton moose pruning your roses and vegetables, but the lush woods surrounding us. This is a wonderful place for roaming children. I think we are gradually moving back into the gardens with them. Phone cameras are outpacing our old cameras and gardeners upload daily to facebook here…’OMG, look what bloomed today!’ Next thing you know there’s twenty images of color and happiness. So, there is hope among the doomscrolling. My protest sign is parked in a lovely terra cotta pot by the front door, which is surrounded by a huge Devil’s Club, Oak Fern, Star flowers, and washed rocks. Most of my serious gardening friends show up at the current political rallies. Social media can be a good thing for gardening. You just have to outfox the algorithms and weed out the junk.
I still have your old article on Walt Mayr in my old nursery files. Trollius are outstanding this year. The Lemon Queens are doing a nice job wandering through the ‘meadow’ that used to be the propagation beds. Doomscrolling? Who has time? We need a month of 24 hour days to cram all our gardening in before freeze up!
Brooke, thank you for your very kind comment! This was not only encouraging, as far as doomscrolling, but also brought up the Walt Mayr Human Flower Project story. I just reread it. Walt and I had some wonderful phone calls…I envy that you can grow Himalayan blue poppies. And Trollius ‘Lemon Queen’. It’s sweltering in central Kentucky. I’d welcome a short cool down, but that doesn’t look imminent. I think I’ll go for a swim.