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In 2014, 35% of American households were growing food, either at home or in a community garden. This can have a huge impact on a child’s diet, with children five times more likely to eat the fruit and vegetables they have been involved with growing compared to those bought from a store. In addition to making children more aware about the food they eat, gardening teaches important values like perseverance. Research by the Royal Horticultural Society in the UK, meanwhile, has also revealed that gardening makes children happy and more resilient. This makes it a particularly important skill for children with special needs, who often have low self-confidence. This one one of many reasons why teaching gardening to children is invaluable and should be encouraged in schools as well as at home.

The many faces of gardening:

Gardening can take on many different forms. It might be a large garden full of grass and greenery, an apple orchard or other fruit trees, a greenhouse full of plants and vegetables or a small plant box on your window sill. Even maintaining a garden lawn requires a certain level of gardening knowledge. Forest days in America have also shown how effective learning can be in an outdoor environment. This is what opens up the world of gardening to kids: it is accessible to every child, no matter their needs, and there is sure to be something in it that interests them. Once you pique that interest, then the real learning and emotional development truly begins.

Why is learning about gardening so important?

Research has shown the profoundly positive impact gardening can have on our health. The benefits of gardening are particularly powerful in young people, with advances in their physical and cognitive development, as well as their emotional wellbeing. Things of note include:

The importance of smell: gardening often means an exposure to flowers and greenery, which have been shown to prompt people to think positive thoughts. The pleasant smells of things like flowers have a hugely positive impact on our memory, emotions, focus and decision-making.

Gardening encourages you to get ‘stuck in’: Gardeners obviously work with their hands. Touch is an extremely powerful sense, playing a pivotal role in lowering stress levels and improving our ability to focus. In addition, being exposed to soil and outside dirt from a young age boosts the immune system, protecting you more from illness and disease.

The importance of being outside: American children’s daily screen time now averages at a staggering two hours a day, at the expense of outdoor play and learning. This is a worrying statistic, due to the health-boosting qualities of the outdoors and the risks associated with a sedentary lifestyle (heart failure, diabetes, weight gain, mental health issues). Along with its mood-lifting benefits, being outside boosts your levels of vitamin D, which is needed for healthy bones and cell growth.

Gardening brings STEM topics to life: gardens can become a child’s classroom, with various aspects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at work in nature. Children have the opportunity to understand STEM topics more completely through practical experiments, group work and observations.

Overall: learning should not be restricted to the classroom

We rely on gardening for food and drink; it is essential for our existence as human beings. That alone should be reason enough for us to help young children to learn about it. Its added benefits of promoting good mental and physical health are crucial. It therefore seems all the more important that gardening is made available to children – particularly those with special needs – and taught in schools from a young age.