What draws us to the garden — even when we don't have to grow anything? Even when life is full, when grief is heavy, when we barely have a balcony to spare?

In this conversation I speak with Hannah Moloney — presenter on ABC Gardening Australia, permaculture educator and designer, climate activist, cabaret performer, author and deliberate optimist. Her new book, Why We Garden: On the Joy and Wonder of Growing Things Even When We Don't Have To, has just been released and it made my heart sing.

Hannah surveyed thousands of people about why they garden. The answer that came back from 94% of respondents? Joy. Not food security. Not saving money. Joy. That alone tells us something profound about our relationship with the living world.

We talk about:

• How Hannah came to ask the question "why do we garden?" — and what she discovered when she actually asked it of thousands of people, including Australian icons Bruce Pascoe, Tim Winton, Bob Brown, Costa Georgiadis, Claire Bowditch and Laura Tingle
• Gardening as healing — how tending a garden moves grief, rage and heartbreak through the body in ways nothing else quite can
• The language we don't yet have in English for that deep sense of knowing, belonging and safety that comes from being in relationship with place
• Why 70–75% of green space in cities is lawn — and what else it could be
• Cuba in the 1990s, guerrilla gardening in 1970s New York, and the Diggers of the 1640s — gardening as ancient and ongoing act of belonging and resistance
• Hannah's climate justice cabaret Time Rebel, her upcoming walk across Tasmania dressed as an Azure Kingfisher, and why art cracks open hearts in ways expertise alone cannot
• Her own arc from herb nursery kid who couldn't wait to leave gardening behind — to someone for whom gardening is life's central practice

Hannah's call to action is simple and radical: get your hands in the earth, your feet on the ground. This knowledge is already in you. It doesn't need to be learned — only remembered.

Find Hannah and her book:

• Why We Garden — available now at bookstores across Australia and at your local library
• ABC Gardening Australia — catch Hannah on

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

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MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

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I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care. 

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.