Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Atwood

To call gardening irrational is to puncture the cozy self-help myth that it’s a tidy hobby with tidy rewards. Atwood’s line lands because it treats gardening less like a weekend project and more like a wager against entropy. You don’t garden because it “makes sense” in a spreadsheet sense; you garden because you want to believe care can still matter in a world that routinely ignores it.

The intent is slyly double-edged. On one level, it’s a confession of compulsion: people plant things knowing they can fail for dumb reasons - frost, pests, heat waves, an afternoon of neglect. On another, it’s a critique of the cult of optimization. Rational acts are supposed to be efficient, measurable, controllable. Gardening is none of that. It’s time-intensive, unpredictable, and stubbornly analog, which is precisely why it becomes a small form of resistance to a culture that insists everything be scalable.

The subtext carries Atwood’s longtime preoccupations: fragile ecosystems, power, and the costs of pretending we’re in charge. Gardening asks you to collaborate with forces you can’t command. You can amend soil, you can water, you can plan, but the outcome is negotiated with weather and biology. That humility is the point.

Context matters: Atwood writes from a late-20th/21st-century vantage where environmental instability is no longer theoretical. In that world, planting is faith without guarantees - an irrationality that reads less like folly than like a necessary kind of hope.