In a comment below, Garnet offers this: "Ah, the veritable concreteness of gardening. Where mistakes can usually be grown back. Where whims are encouraged. Where you get something even if you don’t give."
It is also a physical release for the thinking man. I stink with sweat and lines of garden dirt roll down my face and arms and legs. Unsexy, unpretty, yet I feel beautiful as the green herbs and flowers and ripe red tomatoes that will share the soil I am a part of. There is a sense of goodness in the physicality and grossness of working with the earth, a sharing of a common ground. It will absorb me wholly into it some day; for now, I dabble in its depths and sneak away complete.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology