Retreating to the Earth for Self-Help: How Gardening Can Help Us
Imagine kneeling down next to a bed of daffodils and daisies, one hand in the soil and the other grasping onto a trowel. As you take a deep breath, the mixed perfumes of perennials and Mother Earth are exhilarating. You overcome a powerful sense of happiness and continue gardening.
Mycobacterium vaccae, M. vaccae, is a nonpathogenic type of bacteria that naturally resides in soil. Christopher Lowry, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol in England, found that injections of the bacteria in mice and humans produces and increases levels of serotonin. “The bacteria had the exact same effect as antidepressant drugs,” said Lowry.
Pagan Kennedy, a contributor of The Atlantic, explains in her article. “How to Get High on Soil,” the time when she experimented and “took a dose” of M. vaccae from the compost in her garden:
As I huff the soil, I have no way of knowing exactly how much M. vaccae is floating into my lungs — or whether it’s enough to change my mind. But I can sure smell this compost. The odor hits like a punch and triggers a memory: I recall a day in Western Massachusetts on a friend’s farm, turning earth with a pitchfork. Dried mud extended up my arms, like a pair of long-sleeved gloves, as if I were dressed for a gala event with forest-fairies. I felt dazzled that day, boozed up on sunshine, and in love with the potatoes I’d just dug out of the soil.
Currently, there are researchers figuring out a way to create a vaccine out of M. vaccae to help treat depression. The question that really must be asked: can we vaccinate against depression?
According to researchers and scientists Graham A.W. Rook, Charles L. Raison and Lowry, “many individuals with depression who are otherwise healthy demonstrate a state of persistent inflammatory activation.”
This inflammatory activation is caused by small secreted proteins called cytokines. Cytokines are hidden within certain cells of the immune system and have their good and bad effects on other cells — proinflammatory cytokines are involved in the process of pathological pain.
In the Journal of Affective Disorders, researchers Juan Joseph Young, Davide Bruno and Nunzio Pomara found that there is a strong relationship between proinflammatory cytokines and major depressive disorder. They concluded that these cytokines have an influence on the “progression and severity of depressive disorders.”
Lowry, Raison and Rook hypothesize that people experience mental health advantages from M. vaccae due to it’s “balance of anti-inflammatory to proinflammatory mediators” that stops the depressogenic stimulus in the brain.
However, they also found that the administration of M. vaccae as a vaccine in mice stimulates serotonin in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRI) which sits on the brainstem. This activation of serotonin on the DRI “is a common response to acute treatment with diverse classes of antidepressant drugs.”
There are other ways that digging in dirt with your bare hands improves your mood, such as therapeutic gardening and horticultural therapy.
Horticultural therapy involves the beneficial impacts of garden environments on those with physical and/or mental disabilities. According to the American Horticultural Therapy Association, “horticultural therapy helps improve memory, cognitive abilities, task initiation, language skills, and socialization.” They also note that it can help “strengthen muscles and improve coordination, balance, and endurance.”
In his article “Say it with Flowers,” Graham Hopkins talks with a 32-year-old woman who has learning difficulties. “After the breakdown of her previous specialised learning difficulties day service, not least because of her challenging behaviour, Sarah Temple spent six months in her community home without a placement until an occupational therapist recommended a garden project in London.”
“The working garden offers therapeutic and training placements for people with a range of special needs,” says horticultural therapist and trainer Rosie Hollands. “For Sarah we were looking at enabling her to focus and stay with an activity, and begin to have a sense of belonging in a group — even though she finds it difficult to interact.”
Horticultural therapy can be used to create community projects in schools to create a more dynamic learning environment.
In a study from the Journal of Business Strategies, researchers gave students a semester project to “research and establish a formal plan for the creation of a community garden in the local town.” The project was successfully completed and results from the study showed that students were more engaged in their learning.
“The elements of soil, water, plants, and sunlight combine with the rhythm of the seasons to provide sensations and orientation that can restore a sense of well-being,” said David Kamp in his article “Therapeutic Gardens” from the Hastings Center Report.
The science isn’t quite yet clear behind how horticultural therapy can affect our physical and mental selves.
“What scientists do know is that gardening reduces stress and calms the nerves. It decreases cortisol, a hormone that plays a role in stress response,” reported Kristofor Husted of The Salt from NPR.
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Therefore “gardening is an equalizer,” said the Craig Hospital research supervisor, C.A. Brooks, of Englewood, Colo.
Gardening not only helps us connect closer to our community, it allows us to socialize with those who share similar interests.
My Story
It was a 60 degree day in Duluth, mid-March and all sunshine with just a slight breeze off the lake. My landlord asked me to regrow some grass in areas that my blue merle Australian Shepard, Ellie, damaged after a year of hundreds of frisbee throws and squirrel chases. So, I stepped into my Keen hiking boots and dragged myself outside to tend to my backyard. As I opened that first bag of top soil, the tangy smell of compost was pungent, but oh-so familiar.
The aroma reminds me of the colorful autumn of 2003, when my parents moved my eight-month-old niece and I from the projects of Superior, Wis. to a trailer park off of Lavaque Road in Hermantown, Minn. I was ten-years-old, and I remember our side of the park being brand new, meaning no grass in our yard, only a layer of compostable lawn netting. For years my dad worked on growing his own grass for the yard, which came with unyielding labor. Because our yard was new, there was nothing but clay to work with. I remember helping rake up layers of clay, picking out the rocks, laying down fresh top soil, and repeating that process until the lot was properly prepped for grass seed.
My hands are in the bag of top soil, and I feel a wave of calmness wash over me. It’s been months since I’ve felt this tranquil and in control of what was going on around me in months.
Three weeks prior, I was hospitalized after experiencing a weekend of vomiting, no appetite, and agonizing pain on the left side of my stomach. The doctor’s initially diagnosed me with pancreatitis, so I was put on high doses of morphine and bowel rest, meaning no fluid or food intake by mouth. Later, my doctor informed me that due to the amount of ibuprofen I was prescribed to help manage the pain of my fibromyalgia, the lining of my stomach became severely inflamed and eroded. My pancreatitis became gastritis. I was prescribed seven new medications to take on top of my other three and was advised to no longer take ibuprofen for my fibro.
Two weeks after my hospitalization, the day before spring break, I received an email from the UMD Office of Financial Aid stating, “Your Parent Plus Loan has been cancelled and billed back to your customer account per your mother’s request.” My heart sank into my stomach, and I became frozen from the hurt, anguish, and fear that I was enduring. I felt defeated in the mental battle I had been in for years with my mom and her drug addiction.
Stuck in a dangerous intersection of my physical and mental health, I felt as though I had hit rock bottom. With an important appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester coming up at the end of the month regarding my fibromyalgia, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, and mood disorders, I was desperate to find a way to slow my life down and gain a little control.
It might have been the vernal equinox with the fresh scent of manure in the air, the melting snow, and the early morning chirps of chickadees, but after my first full day of yardwork in my small back yard on Observation Hill, I found my natural antidepressant.
Sources:
“About Horticultural Therapy.” American Horticultural Therapy Association,
www.ahta.org/horticultural-therapy.
Brooks, C.A. “Gardening can ya dig it?” PN — Paraplegia News, vol. 59, no. 3, 2005, p. 14+. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.libpdb.d.umn.edu:2048/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=mnauduluth&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA130647495&asid=bd9b0da4cb314bd5f7b83254303c23f5. Accessed 21 May 2017.
Glausiusz, Josie. “Is Dirt the New Prozac?” Discover Magazine. Kalmbach Publishing Co., 14 June 2007. Web. 3 May 2017.
Hopkins, Graham. “say it with flowers.” Community Care, 17 Apr. 2003, p. 44. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.libpdb.d.umn.edu:2048/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=mnauduluth&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA100169913&asid=7849e1888b59263be813fc98c62657f1. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Husted, Kristofor. “Can Gardening Help Troubled Minds Heal?” NPR, The Salt, 22 Feb. 2012, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/02/17/147050691/can-gardening-help-troubled-minds-heal. Accessed 3 May 2017.
Kamp, David. “Therapeutic gardens.” The Hastings Center Report, Sept.-Oct. 1997, p. 48. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.libpdb.d.umn.edu:2048/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=mnauduluth&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA20132052&asid=b92d88521d52e56843e4143f10529859. Accessed 3 May 2017.
Kennedy, Pagan. “How to Get High on Soil.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 31 Jan. 2012. Web. 3 May 2017.
Rook, Graham A.w., Charles L. Raison, and Christopher A. Lowry. “Can We Vaccinate against Depression?” Drug Discovery Today 17.9–10 (2012): 451–58. Academic OneFile. Web. 3 May 2017.
Wikipedia contributors. “Mycobacterium vaccae.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 4 May. 2017. Web. 5 May. 2017.
Wozniak, Jeffrey R., et al. “Building a community garden: a collaborative cross-disciplinary academic community engagement project.” Journal of Business Strategies, Fall 2016, p. 95+. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.libpdb.d.umn.edu:2048/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=mnauduluth&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480029127&asid=c35764a5486702e7d5c58309cd4e8cd3. Accessed 30 May 2017.
Young, Juan Joseph, et al. “A Review of the Relationship between Proinflammatory Cytokines and Major Depressive Disorder.” Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 169, 2014, pp. 15–20., doi:10.1016/j.jad.2014.07.032. Accessed 4 May 2017.
