Your Home, Garden and Travel

Turn on the TV or read the daily news and the headlines are filled with economic woes and worries, catastrophes and violence. There's not much there to make a person happy.

I don't start my day with the news, I start my day with my "blog rounds" to read about what's happening with my gardening friends. It's fair to say that my gardening friends share happiness. My friends deliver a daily dose of information, photos and stories to put a smile on my face.

What is amazing is that very few of us have ever met each other in person. When I got together this fall with a few gardening friends from a forum, one remarked "I've never met a gardener that I didn't like." We weren't strangers, after all.

Apparently, there is now scientific evidence that our version of social networking, where we share good things and happiness, is contagious. According to this CNN article by Elizabeth Landau:

New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.

Are we gardening for happiness?

The lives of gardeners are enriched by the activity of gardening, the results of gardening and the sharing of their gardens with others. There was a time when most people, throughout the world, gardened in one way or another. Plants were shared among neighbors. Friends and family gathered in gardens for socializing.

We now visit and share our gardens over the Web. The world is flat. Through blogging, we visit each other's gardens that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away in another zone. It doesn't matter if we can't grow the same flowers. Even when we share our disappointments, our fellow gardeners soothe our sadness and lift our spirits.

We're spreading the happiness of gardening, through blogging. What if everyone started their day by reading happy stories from bloggers like us?

Photo and story by Freda Cameron