Private garden uses and associated mental well-being benefits during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown – a social media investigation

During the UK’s first national Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020, people had greatly diminished access to public green spaces due to government restrictions. This provided an opportunity to investigate people’s discourse on the uses of private green spaces and associated mental well-being benefits during a period of crisis. We used Twitter posts, and thus self-reporting, to identify private garden uses, changes therein during Covid-19 lockdown and associations with mental well-being benefits. Our Twitter search (now X) for garden-related tweets concerned Greater London. Posts written during the first UK lockdown in 2020 and the preceding year’s corresponding period were queried and compared. We subjected all resulting tweets (8,866) to a word count analysis. Next, we iteratively screened posts for false positives and subjected verified posts to thematic analysis until reaching saturation, assigning themes for reported garden uses and mental well-being benefits to 600 relevant posts. The estimated number of tweets mentioning private garden use was 5.2 times higher during the Covid-19 lockdown, confirming the importance of gardens during this period of crisis. We identified five garden use types, of which socialising and leisure activities had the greatest relative share of tweets during lockdown (up from 34% to 42%). Communicated garden use also diversified, with home-based working and DIY expressed almost exclusively during lockdown. Furthermore, the share of posts mentioning garden use to provide mental well-being benefits increased considerably (from 4% to 20%). We identified five categories of mental well-being benefits, with two ( mitigation of restlessness and providing hope ) reported only during lockdown. Our findings show that the Covid-19 crisis transformed the way people talked and thought about their private gardens. We suggest that urban planners and conservation organisations reconsider private garden use interests as diverse and changeable and create future programmes to promote multi-functional private gardens for healthier communities.