With the pandemic raging last year, Sourdough wasn’t the only Instagram close-up shot. Flourishing gardens and houseplants stopping the show have been a common sight on social networks as people across the country show their newfound green fingers.
But what have people just turned to? During a pandemic, why should it be attractive to grow carrots or fill your home with so many houseplants that they resemble the Amazon rainforest? Psychology experts are trying to figure this out, but they have some theories.
A thriving interest in plants
The evidence that people have become more interested in plants and gardening in the past year is everywhere.
Seed companies were selling many of the strains they typically sell, and packages that could be shipped over a period of days took weeks as the companies were overwhelmed with orders. Some websites even had to shut down for some time to focus on fulfilling their current seed orders.
It wasn’t just seeds that were quickly snapped up, but also tree nursery stocks.
Plants like echeveria, cacti, kalatha, ferns and air plants are much harder to find, said Brian Thorson, the botanical curator at California State University in Long Beach, who runs the greenhouses that grow plants for research and teaching purposes at the university .
He said many of the plants he would normally find in kindergartens are becoming harder and harder to come by because so many people have taken up gardening or houseplants as a hobby.
“They’re just flying off the shelves it seems,” Thorson said. “You see them in stock and then they’re gone.”
Something original
Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, conducted research suggesting that increased interest in gardening may have been a response to COVID-19 deaths.
With the virus and its death toll on people more, it could have led people to engage in subsistence activities like cooking, home improvement, and gardening.
The research surveyed more than 1,100 Californians and nearly 1,000 Rhode Islanders and asked questions about changes in their lives during the pandemic. Greenfield and her colleagues also analyzed social media posts and Google searches 70 days before and 70 days after President Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency.
Activities such as gardening, cooking, or DIY were more common among those where death was a problem.
In a telephone interview, Greenfield said there are parallels between what we are seeing in the United States under the pandemic and the behaviors she observed in a Mayan Indian village in Chiapas, Mexico in 1969 and 1970. She said the village had no access to shops, clean water, or plumbing, and as a result, concerns about death were quite high.
Subsistence activities played a major role in everyday village life. People grew their own food and made their own clothes.
“With COVID, we have turned to these conditions,” Greenfield explained, explaining that Americans have become more isolated, have reduced material resources and are at great risk of death.
But unlike in the Mayan village in Chiapas, where these conditions had existed for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes associated with it came much more suddenly.
“It was so amazing how quickly these changes happened and it made me think that this is something that is built into people,” she said.
Greenfield said she thinks these behaviors could be survival responses “that are there, just waiting to have conditions that threaten survival to come out with activities like gardening.”
Get into the river
Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Riverside, said gardening is an example of what people in the field of psychology call a river activity – an activity in which people lose track of time, self-esteem, and become one with what they do.
“In a way, the river is basically in the zone,” Sweeny said.
Because people invest so heavily in flow activities, it helps them not to worry or think, and that can be an important thing during a pandemic.
There is already evidence that flow activities make people feel better in times of need.
Sweeny was part of a group of researchers conducting a study in China in February 2020 when the coronavirus peaked in Wuhan and other cities. For the study, they created a survey, which they shared on social media, asking people about the types of activities and states of mind they had experienced over the past week.
“What we found is that people in quarantine were much better off experiencing a river,” Sweeny said.
The results of the survey didn’t surprise Sweeny that much.
“Go figure,” she said. “Having time comfortably is a good thing when you’re stuck at home.”
