Gardening research in the news

Aug. 20, 2020

Cucumber plant in a backyard

Gardening research in the news

If a home gardening project has ever lifted your mood, research shows you’re not alone. A recent study by the Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Systems Lab and the University of Minnesota found that the level of happiness reported while gardening was similar to what people experienced while biking, walking, or dining out.

“Many more people garden than we think, and it appears that it associates with higher levels of happiness similar to walking and biking,” said corresponding author Anu Ramaswami, Princeton’s Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies, professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). “In the movement to make cities more livable, gardening might be a big part of improving quality-of-life.”

“The boost to emotional well-being is comparable to other leisure activities that currently get the lion’s share of infrastructure investment,” said first author Graham Ambrose, a research specialist in Princeton’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “These findings suggest that, when choosing future well-being projects to fund, we should pay just as much attention to household gardening.”

The findings came from a study of 370 people in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area for which people used a cellphone app called Daynamica to report their emotional well-being while engaged in any of 15 daily activities. The app was developed by study co-author Yingling Fan, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Minnesota, who led a larger emotional well-being study as a part of the National Science Foundation-funded Sustainable Healthy Cities Network led by Ramaswami. Co-author Kirti Das, a postdoctoral research associate in civil and environmental engineering at Princeton, was instrumental in recruiting participants from a range of communities and in implementing the survey.

The paper, “Is gardening associated with greater happiness of urban residents? A multi-activity, dynamic assessment in the Twin-Cities region, USA,” was published in the June 2020 issue of Landscape and Urban Planning. This research was conducted as part of the Sustainable Healthy Cities Network, a collaboration funded by the National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Research Network (award number 1444745) between universities, cities, governments, nongovernmental organizations and industry partners working together to develop the science and practical knowledge necessary for achieving sustainable, healthy and livable cities.

Read the full story from Princeton Environmental Institute.

View an infographic of the findings from Princeton Environmental Institute.

Read additional news coverage of the study below.

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