Everyone has a different understanding of what is beautiful. It's common knowledge that taste is subjective. As the saying goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Basically, what some people find beautiful, others can find hideous. 

Gardens aren’t an exception to this rule. What makes a beautiful garden is a subjective matter. As this Quora thread shows, some find gardens with an abundance of wildflowers the epitome of beauty. At the same time, others don’t feel the need for flowers. They prefer the green coziness or gardens with greenhouses and vegetable gardens or something else. To each their own.  

Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson said that beauty is influenced by our similarities and differences in how close the imitation is to reality. With this he had two types of beauty in mind: relative beauty – the one found in art – and absolute beauty – the one in nature. 

Some define absolute beauty as something unique and immortal. It’s something that provides warmth, joy, and happiness by looking at it. So, in a way, we can agree with Francis Hutcheson’s idea that nature is absolute beauty, can’t we? Even though we all have different meanings of what beautiful nature is (or gardens, in the sense of today’s topic), we still appreciate its uniqueness. 

That’s how accounts like @beautiful.gardens come to be. This exact account, which was created back in 2015 and was active until 2019, used to share beautiful photos of gardens, hence the name. These pictures of gardens came from various places in the world. There are pics of Scotland, Morocco, and England, to mention a few. 

The images really resonated with Instagram users, as currently, the account has over 51K followers. Sadly, since there have been no new photos uploaded for 5 years now, the number isn’t likely to increase significantly. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the already existing pictures cannot be appreciated – after all, their beauty isn’t diminished because the account isn’t active. 

Knowing how much work and creative thinking goes into building such captivating gardens, we can appreciate these images even more. Planting the flowers and making sure they grow nice and healthy isn’t the only task. Even though this also requires more work than one might think. You need to know when and what kind of seeds to plant, what type of dirt you need, how to maintain them, and so on. 

Then, there’s controlling the weeds, getting rid of pests and other animals, and a lot of other stuff. There’s also decorating. Well, the latter is more optional, but more often than not, gardens include some decorations. Maybe just some nice pots or garden art; it’s still decoration. 

At the same time, all this hard work results in something that not only the owner, but many others can enjoy too. Having something beautiful to gaze at is never a bad thing. It’s proven that nature is beneficial for mental health. In fact, gardening itself can improve a person's well-being as well. For example, it can reduce one’s levels of stress and help in dealing with anxiety and depression. 

So, what we can take away from this is that beautiful gardens are not only something nice to look at but something that can improve one’s life. And what could be better than that, right? 

What kind of gardens do you like the most? Share with us in the comments!