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.
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.
Doomscrolling and the future of gardening originally appeared on GardenRant on April 30, 2025.
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