Is gardening a respite from too much screen time, a meditative practice, or an opportunity to nourish friends? Backyard gardener Jackson Alexander says it’s all three at once. And more.
A Garden Grown from Silence
Life on Earth is loud, but the earth itself is quiet. The soundless soil swallows your thoughts like a nightcrawler and digests them back as fertile silence, a place to sow your spirit. In the garden you work with the silence, let it consume you, heal you, teach you.
Santa Fe’s backyard gardener Jackson Alexander, with help from photographer Leroy Grafe, is not only sharing produce with his community, but also the beauty of these quiet moments via the Instagram account @jacksgardensantafe.
Nature as Art, Healing as Practice
Vrije University Medical Centre in the Netherlands found that just viewing images of nature can be enough to lower your stress levels. So even if you’re not the one actively getting dirty, you can still soak in some of the benefits from pictures of a garden. For folks like Alexander who spend much of the day in front of a screen, a few moments scrolling through vibrant pictures of produce or the movement of soil falling from one’s hands can be a welcome reprieve for the mind.
“Gardening is the most calming thing that I’ve ever found,” says Santa Fe’s backyard gardener Jackson Alexander. “It’s meditative and all other thoughts leave when I’m deep in it. It’s a beautiful hobby.”
Those moments when the air shifts and the sun shines just a little brighter wake up something primal within us to plant flowers, start seeds, and watch new life grow. Somewhere in our DNA we know that through every heirloom seed we are connected to the whole of human history.
“My grandmother and mother are both super-passionate gardeners, so I grew up around floral gardens,” says Alexander. “I also love the look of xeriscaping. I found that there’s a sort of simplicity to it that is reminiscent of Japanese Zen gardens.”
From Compost to Connection
Alexander, who studied communications and graphic design, credits photographer Andy Goldsworthy as spurring along his interest in making nature as art. He admired the way Goldsworthy manipulated nature into ephemeral pieces of art and decided to get his hands dirty, too.
“I love the production of food, and half of it to me is arranging and dressing beautiful spaces and working with the landscape to create that balance between what is manmade and what is natural,” he says.
Using only his backyard in Santa Fe’s Agua Fria neighborhood, Alexander starts his own seeds and grows more than enough to share. Some of his goals are to make small-batch hot sauce and learn more about the art of bonsai.
“You can never really do enough, so if you have a little time, you can always go and tinker around in the garden. It’s never-ending. It’s so satisfying to grow your own food. You get to make meals with family and friends with all this food you’ve grown.”
Gardening as a Digital Detox
One of the most important things Alexander says he learned was from YouTuber Charles Dowding: do not till the soil, but just add compost on top, year after year. “One of his main points is about composting and the importance of soil heath. That was something I’d never thought about. How all this food waste coming out of my kitchen, or all the leaves on the ground in the fall are incredible soil-building material.”
At some level we never outgrow playing in the dirt. If you need a hug from Mother Earth, Alexander recommends popping some beet seeds in the ground because you can grow a lot in a small space. You can spend the roughly 70 days it will take them to grow collecting recipes for all the amazing ways to cook them, from roasting to pickling.
Story by Ungelbah Davila
Photography by Leroy Grafe
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