Gardening

Research summary

• Gardening's evidence base is real but modest, drawn mostly from studies where it is measured as one of several leisure activities rather than in isolation.
• The Lothian Birth Cohort 1921, following 475 Scottish adults from age 79 to 90, found frequent gardeners had a 22% lower mortality risk (hazard ratio 0.78) than those who rarely or never gardened, alongside slower declines in gait speed and telomere length over the follow-up period -- one of the few studies to track gardening specifically over decades.
• In a Chinese cohort of over 30,000 adults aged 80 and older, gardening was among several leisure activities (alongside reading, cards, and keeping pets) associated with lower all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratios of 0.82-0.89) when practiced almost daily, and a separate 9,690-person Chinese cohort found leisure activities including gardening were linked to a 14-16% lower mortality risk regardless of participants' genetic longevity score.
• On wellbeing specifically, an umbrella review pooling 40 studies found gardening and horticultural therapy had a significant positive effect on measures of mental wellbeing (effect size 0.55), and a meta-analysis of 20 randomized controlled trials of group-based gardening programs found suggestive but uncertain evidence of increased wellbeing and reduced depression symptoms, limited by heterogeneity and unclear risk of bias across studies.
• Because almost none of the mortality evidence isolates gardening from other leisure activities or fully controls for the fact that healthier, more mobile older adults are more able to garden in the first place, this should be read as a promising but not yet independently proven longevity habit.