Josh O’Connor keeps planting things he rarely gets to watch bloom, Pamela Anderson took a month in her beds to decompress after a shoot. Amanda Seyfried says it’s heaven on Earth. A look at actors and their gardens.
“I’ll do work on my garden, and then I’ll jet off and not see the fruits of my labor,” Josh O’Connor said in June while promoting Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day.” “So there’s a little bit of, like, I want to be in my garden for a bit.”
O’Connor is not the only actor scheduling his life around a growing season. Zach Galifianakis spent the spring hosting a six-episode Netflix series about small farms and where food comes from. Pamela Anderson gave herself a month in her Vancouver Island beds after wrapping “Alma.” Cate Blanchett recorded a podcast with King Charles about a seed vault in West Sussex. Judi Dench turned six acres behind her Surrey house into a woodland planted in memory of people she has lost. Isabella Rossellini put 23 acres of her Long Island farm into a conservation easement and started raising heritage-breed sheep.
It’s not just actors; Americans spent a record $79 billion on lawn and garden products in 2025, up 13.5 percent over the prior year, and a record $740 per gardening household, according to the National Gardening Association’s 2026 survey. The same survey found that roughly 4.5 million households stopped gardening altogether during that period, which makes the people still doing it a smaller and considerably more committed group.
Why gardening is good for mental and physical health
The strongest recent evidence for what a garden does for our health came out of a randomized controlled trial of 291 non-gardening adults in the Denver area, published in The Lancet Planetary Health and funded by the American Cancer Society. Participants assigned to a community garden plot ate 1.4 grams more fiber a day, moved about 42 minutes more per week, and reported measurable drops in stress and anxiety, with the largest reductions among those who started out the most stressed.
“These findings provide concrete evidence that community gardening could play an important role in preventing cancer, chronic diseases and mental health disorders,” Jill Litt, the study’s senior author and a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said of the results. “It’s not just about the fruits and vegetables. It’s also about being in a natural space outdoors together with others.”
A 2024 umbrella review in Systematic Reviews pulled together 40 systematic reviews of gardening and horticultural therapy and found a significant positive effect on well-being. Depression and anxiety symptoms, cognitive function, quality of life, and social connection all improved across the pooled studies, though the authors flagged wide variation in quality among the reviews they assessed. A meta-analysis published in 2025 found a large effect on depression and a moderate effect on anxiety when structured horticultural therapy was compared against control groups. Whether the sessions ran indoors or out made no measurable difference to the outcome, which suggests the mechanism has more to do with tending something than with the extra fresh air.
Actors who garden
From a rocky stretch of Canadian coastline to a Montecito olive allée to 28 acres on Long Island that double as a working farm, actors and their gardens.
Josh O’Connor
Josh O’Connor works his garden in the gaps between productions, which means he does the labor and misses most of the payoff. A film shoot runs longer than a growing season, and he has talked about wanting a stretch of time to be himself instead, an idea that in his telling includes the garden, his ceramics, and the people he loves. “There’s just a feeling of excitement around being me for a little bit,” he said. He has kept the habit anyway, planting through years in which “The Crown,” “Challengers,” and “La Chimera” all took him elsewhere.
Pamela Anderson
On Vancouver Island, on a property with vegetable beds, a wildflower field, a rocky beach, and a pier, Pamela Anderson is most herself. “The garden is my re-entry back to myself,” she told Homes & Gardens, describing a month of decompression after filming. “When in doubt, I put my sun hat on, my gardening gloves, boots, and grab my clippers and a harvest basket and head down to my garden by the sea.” She keeps every scrap of plant matter on the property for compost and leaf mould, and she has a rule about the entrance. “I believe rosemary should be at every garden gate,” she said. “It is lucky.”
Zach Galifianakis
Comedian Zach Galifianakis built a Netflix series around visits to apple orchards, tomato farms, mushroom growers, and foragers, and he came to it with a genuine grievance about the food system. “The way we get food is so perverse right now,” he said of the show. His pitch is characteristically deadpan. “If I could offer a remedy to the human condition, it would be a garden.”
Gwyneth Paltrow
The actor and goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow’s Montecito garden was designed by the landscape architect Christine London and runs to raised vegetable beds, a stone fruit orchard, an olive allée with a long teak table, a tea garden, and a zinc-topped potting bench, according to goop. She grows Fukushu kumquats, lacinato kale, baby artichokes, sugar snap peas, red cabbage, blueberries, and a full herb bench. “I never feel more gratitude for the life I have more deeply than when I am in my Montecito garden,” she said in a video tour. “Plants that bear fruit feel like a miracle.”
Cate Blanchett
The first ambassador for Wakehurst, Kew’s wild botanic garden in West Sussex, Cate Blanchett says her interest started as an errand. “I was a crazed parent, who came from the school run seeking sanctuary,” she told House & Garden. What kept her was the Millennium Seed Bank and the way the site refuses to tidy itself. “It’s not always beautiful in a picturesque way,” she said. “You see the full cycle of nature here: the fallow periods and the regeneration.” She has since recorded an episode of Kew’s “Unearthed” podcast with King Charles in the private gardens at Windsor Castle.
Dame Judi Dench
Dame Judi Dench has spent decades converting the land behind her Surrey farmhouse into a private wood, planting a tree each time someone close to her died. “I’ve even turned my six-acre garden into a secret woodland, and I see my trees as my extended family,” she said in the 2017 BBC documentary “Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees.” She started the practice with her husband, the actor Michael Williams. “It is about remembering,” she said, “and for me, it’s something that’s living and goes on.”
Dame Helen Mirren
A free afternoon for Dame Helen Mirren as an opportunity to get her hands in the soil, and she has argued that the skill belongs on a school timetable. “I love to spend time in my garden. If I have a few free hours I love to dig around in the dirt. It’s so calming, worthwhile and a really good way of keeping those dark dragons away,” she said. “They should teach it in schools.”
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick keep a 40-acre farm in Sharon, Connecticut, with goats, pigs, alpacas, miniature horses, and beds of tomatoes, basil, peppers, zucchini, and herbs. The arrangement has changed what he eats. “I no longer eat goat and I no longer eat pig, because I have goats and I have pigs,” he told People. He described the appeal of harvest in physical terms, as “taking something hot off the vine that feels warm and smells like it’s been created by all these natural forces of the sun and air and water and earth and dirt, and then putting it back into your body to sustain yourself.”
Amanda Seyfried
Mamma Mia star Amanda Seyfried moved to a Hudson Valley farm and has organized her life around it, keeping chickens, peacocks, sheep, horses, and a vegetable garden of lettuce, blueberries, and tomatoes. “It’s nature. You have space and the energy coming from animals,” she told The Irish Times. “And it’s like heaven on Earth.”
Alicia Silverstone
If there’s one thing Alicia Silverstone isn’t clueless about, it’s growing her own food. She has gardened the canyon property above Los Angeles she bought at 19, growing avocados, berries, persimmons, lettuce, and herbs alongside solar panels and a grey water system that routes bathwater to the fruit trees.
Richard Gere
Richard Gere and his wife, Alejandra, built a vegetable garden during the pandemic and have kept it going, growing mixed lettuce, zucchini, kale, and red and golden beets, Homes & Gardens reported. Alejandra Gere described the project on Instagram as something the household took on together, writing that they “invested our time to create this incredible small vegetable garden” and “did it all together as a family.”
Isabella Rossellini
Rossellini runs Mama Farm on 28 acres in Brookhaven, New York, where she grows heirloom produce, herbs, and flowers and raises heritage-breed chickens and sheep, having placed 23 of those acres in a conservation easement with the Peconic Land Trust. “It’s no longer just my private home and garden. The property may belong to me, but it is also now part of the community,” she said.
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