Blooming Through Failure

04.13.26

Hello, and happy spring! I am overjoyed with the warm weather and vibrant colors overtaking all of the trees and flowers recently and am sure you are, too! Although we are in the season of new life, I want to take a little 180 today and actually focus on dying plants!

Dead plants can actually teach us resilience in a full-circle approach, so let us dive in!

With gardening comes failure. It is easy to overwater your plants, have the wrong light conditions, or use the incorrect fertilizer. But these tiny failures can surprisingly have a huge impact on your subconscious mind by training your brain to respond better to bigger challenges.

According to the National Library of Medicine’s study, Community Gardening: Stress, Well-Being, and Resilience Potentials, "engagement in community gardening should also be helpful in increasing resilience… and leading to significant improvements in well-being.” Typically, when we fail, our brain releases cortisol, the stress hormone, making us feel unsafe and threatened. The Institute for Educational Advancement states, “In the high-stress state… scans reveal less activity in the higher, reflective brain and more activity in the lower, reactive brain.” The higher brain includes your prefrontal cortex, which handles problem-solving, and the lower brain is the more impulsive and emotional thinking. Thus, when we fail, we are more likely to overreact and think with our emotions rather than logic. But gardening failures have a much lower consequence than failing a midterm or losing your job.

Gardening is a grounding hobby that actually helps reduce cortisol, so you view the process as more of an experiment rather than perfection. Gardeners are not being overwhelmed emotionally, just simply living through the failures, which encourages them to retry rather than give up or avoid the situation entirely. It allows for failure to seem natural, which, over time, builds a healthier response to failure overall.

Gardening naturally pushes people to have a growth mindset. This is the belief that abilities and intelligence are developed through learning and effort, rather than a fixed mindset, where one believes that traits are unchangeable. Joe Lamp’l, highlighted in an interview with Seth J. Gillian, a licensed psychologist, said that making mistakes allows him to “look at them as a chance to learn something new. Through those mishaps, you can understand what happened and why, and you can be empowered to relate that learning to new things.” Just by spending time in a garden, you are naturally training yourself to handle failure and stressful situations – even ones that do not have any correlation to gardening.

There is a term I learned in my psychology class recently called the External Locus of Control. This is the belief that you are not in control of your life outcomes; rather, outside forces—such as fate or luck—are. There will always be situations over which you are not in full control, and the outcome of that may cause panic. So, whenever I am next in a position where I might be scared of failing or trying to handle life setbacks, I plan to engage in a little gardening. I will be more patient and adaptable as a result!