Josh O’Connor would rather garden than premiere — and the stress and longevity benefits of gardening suggest the actor is onto something.
Josh O’Connor plants things he will not be around to watch grow. He sows, he weeds, he waters, and then a film calls and he is gone — to a Steven Spielberg set in Manhattan, to a tennis court in Italy, to wherever the work is — and the garden carries on without him, indifferent to his Emmy. “I love gardening. I’ll do work on my garden, and then I’ll jet off and not see the fruits of my labor,” he told NPR’s Fresh Air in June, while promoting his lead role in Spielberg’s summer blockbuster “Disclosure Day.” What he seems to crave, in the gaps between blockbusters, is dirt.
The habit predates the fame, or keeps pace with it. O’Connor has talked about his allotment the way other actors talk about their trainers; “I love work but I also love tending to my plants,” ran a headline around the release of “Challengers.” He has wandered the Chelsea Flower Show. He describes the life he wants to build for himself, once the press tours quiet down, as a slightly domestic one. “Maybe I want to be Josh for a little bit and feel what that feels like, and that includes gardening,” he told Fresh Air, adding that the plan also involves ceramics and his “65-year-old-woman thing.”
Why the garden
What pulls O’Connor back to the soil is the same thing that typically pulls anyone there, only his version comes with a flight itinerary attached. O’Connor describes acting as a job that asks him to fall in love with a character, live as that person for months, and then grieve when the production ends; he has said he gets sick at the close of nearly every job he finishes. A garden does none of that. It wants water and attention, it rewards both, and it does not require him to be anyone else, just himself in the mud.
The reward is not only in his head. Researchers who study plants and people have started measuring what gardeners always suspected, and the numbers point one way. “We see a clear connection with the fact that being around plants improves cortisol levels in our body,” Melinda Knuth, an assistant professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University, told Time. “We hold our stress hormone, cortisol, in our saliva, and we know this is decreased when we’re around plants.”
In one study, participants who repotted a houseplant reported feeling soothed and registered a drop in blood pressure, while the group asked to complete a computer task instead felt the opposite, their stress spiking. “There’s an evolutionary response when you see green — it’s almost like you created yourself a sanctuary,” Gary L. Altman, associate director of the horticultural therapy program at Rutgers, told Time. “It reduces feelings of fear and anxiety, and even if you’re angry, it’ll calm you down.”
Clinicians have built whole practices on that response. Derrick Stowell, a past president of the American Horticultural Therapy Association, uses plants with people recovering from strokes, brain injuries, and substance use disorder, turning the small decisions of a garden — what to plant, when to harvest — into a rehearsal for the larger ones. The therapy works in a community plot and it works on a windowsill; “that’s where houseplants and growing plants at home comes in,” he said.
Gardening and a longer life
Push the timeline out far enough, and the destressor starts to look like a longevity secret. Dan Buettner, the researcher who spent two decades cataloging the world’s longest-lived communities for his Blue Zones project, found gardens nearly everywhere there were larger numbers of the population who reached 100. The centenarians of Sardinia, Okinawa, and Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula were not training for longevity; they were simply outside, bent over their vegetables, every day. “People in blue zones, they’re not thinking about their health or a diet or an exercise program,” Buettner told NPR. “They’re not doing anything except living their lives.”
His prescription, for the rest of us, is almost comically modest. “Plant a garden in your backyard,” Buettner said. “A garden nudges you to weed and water and harvest almost every day,” and the daily errand of it keeps a body in low, constant motion, the kind that outlasts any gym membership. It also feeds the cook a particular diet: in the Blue Zones, where meat is rare and beans are a staple, Buettner found that “a cup of beans a day is associated with an extra four years of life expectancy.”
O’Connor, for his part, has already tasted the off-grid version. He spent the shoot of his Italian film “La Chimera” living in a van, happier, he has said, than the trappings of stardom tend to make him. The garden is the part of that life he can carry home between jobs, the one collaborator that does not need a call sheet. He keeps planting for a version of himself who will eventually stay long enough to see it bloom.
“[G]ardening is, at its heart, a small act of life,” O’Connor told the Guardian. “You tend to this thing, which gives you some joy for, particularly in the U.K., like, two months of the year. Then it dies and you tend to it again, you enjoy it, then it dies. It’s repetitive and pointless, but we do it.”
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