Caring Gardener

"She wants a little bit of earth
She'll plant some seeds
The seeds will grow
The flowers bloom
Their beauty just the thing she needs..."

— The Secret Garden, "A Bit of Earth"

Maybe it's just a tree they've been tending to for years, a farm full of fruits and vegetables, or a flower they've just planted. Whatever the case, the Gardener is someone who grows and takes care of plants, and this often shows how much they care about living things in general.

The Gardener may be a farmer, gardener, someone doing it for a hobby, or someone simply caring enough about a certain plant in particular to want to keep it alive. May use magical/enchanted or highly advanced items for better results, although regular shovels or watering cans are more likely to be in use. Often what becomes of those who experience Call to Agriculture. A Caring Gardener cares about everything from humans to the grass beneath their feet.

Compare Green Thumb, which is about plant controlling powers, and Fertile Feet, where a person's powers cause plants to instantly grow whenever their feet touch the ground. But if they fall into a Heroic BSoD, they might end up with a Neglected Garden. For the opposite of the Caring Gardener, see Weeding Out Imperfections, where a villain compares "useful" people to flowers and "useless" people to weeds.

Truth in Television, especially as a hobby for older children and retirees.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Dear Alice: The female farmer is shown harvesting peaches for donations, helping feed her community and being a caring mother while also maintaining a beautiful garden of flowers around her home in addition to running her small farm.

Anime & Manga

• Haru of Beastars is the only member of her school's gardening club and tends to a large rooftop garden on one of the school's buildings. She also goes out of her way to keep all the plants and flowers in the campus healthy and looking their best. Being a rabbit who was always pitied for her size and defenselessness, taking care of plants was one of the things she did to cope because for once she was a protector instead of being the protected. While discussing gardening with Legoshi, she states that her and the plants "need each other."
• Shiemi of Blue Exorcist. Ever since she was a young child, Shiemi loved gardening. While Shiemi is a sweet girl, she's also painfully shy and never ventures out of her grandmother's garden until Rin and Yukio intervene. She becomes an Exwire, but still loves plant life and her knowledge in gardening can be useful on occasion.
• A Certain Magical Index: Harzak Lolas, the caretaker of Lindy Blueshake, also gardens as a hobby.
• Senshi from Delicious in Dungeon grows vegetables in the backs of earth golems. He's also highly respectful of the titular dungeon and always tries his best not to harm it in any way, even when harvesting resources (e.g. never hunting too many members of one species at a time).
• Fruits Basket: Yuki Sohma, the polite and soft-spoken "Prince" of the school, has a private vegetable garden that he refers to as his "secret base". His willingness to reveal it to Tohru and letting her help him take care of it is a notable sign that he's opening up more to her.
• Kenichi Shirahama of Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is a member of the gardening club. A whole chapter is dedicated to some thugs who seek revenge on him destroying the plants he and fellow member Yuuka Izumi are tending to, and they frantically try to save as many as possible afterwards.
• Lucoa from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a former agricultural goddess who does volunteer farm work in her spare time (and she does it all by hand rather than using her magic). It draws a sharp contrast with her normal role as a Comedic Shotacon.
• Fred of Moriarty the Patriot cares for the gardens for the Moriartys and is very fond of the roses especially, and is also one of the only members besides William of the Moriarty crew to take an active interest in helping people individually.
• Both Naruto and Gaara from Naruto tend to plants in their spare time. Naruto doesn't have any preference, but Gaara prefers Cacti.
• In the second season of Princess Tutu, Duck meets a kindly girl named Freya who tends to the gardens on the academy grounds because she loves the beautiful way that the flowers bloom.
• Ryouji Kaji from Neon Genesis Evangelion is typically laid-back and has a reputation of being a womanizer, but he also keeps a small watermelon garden that he likes to care for,
• Samurai Executioner: A condemned prisoner asks Asaemon to decapitate his prize chrysanthemum before taking his head, and then spend a year growing a new one before decapitating it too. Asaemon complies, but finds that he cannot decapitate the one he grew himself. The old gardener had killed someone in a rage for carelessly damaging his flowers, and wanted Asaemon to understand his mindset.
• Flowertchi from Tamagotchi is an Innocent Flower Girl who is often seen taking care of the flowers at Tamagotchi School, as well as the garden at her own house.
• Tiger & Bunny: In season 2, Barnaby Brooks jr. had filled his minimalistic Ascetic Aesthetic apartment with various plants that he loves and cares for when returning from his hero duties. It reflects his warmer and kinder deposition after the events of the first season.

Comic Books

• The DC Comics character Poison Ivy from Batman, is a subversion, as a villainous gardener, hurting people, instead of helping them, usually caring only for plants and not for people. Over the years, she has gained several plant-based powers, although her backstory is usually kept as her starting as a mundane gardener/botanist.
• Storm of the X-Men maintained a wide variety of plants in her attic room of Xavier's mansion and was genuinely remorseful and guilt-ridden to find them all dead after her long sojourn in space.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Played With. The Amazon sculptor Iphthime values plants and gardens as a hobby and seems like a very mellow mediator rather than as stubborn and competitive as most Amazons. However she aided in the plot which kicked of the Themysciran Civil war even if she turned on the saboteurs once she realizes just how far they intended to go, she still aided in their plot to frame the Bana for defacing and mining the memorial at Dooms Doorway.

Fan Works

• Rocketship Voyager. Agritech Keshari runs the Air Garden that recycles the air and provides vegetables for the eponymous rocketship. She is the Caring Gardener version as she acts as The Confidant for the crew, and even offers to make a Heroic Sacrifice to get them back home.
• The Warhammer 40,000 fic A Wolf in the Garden portrays Nurgle of all people as this. Though it's Justified with this version embodying all of Nurgle's positive aspects, which his Chaos counterpart actively purged from himself and sealed behind The Veil along with the other Chaos Gods.

Films — Animation

• The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: In The Blustery Day and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Too, it's established that Rabbit loves tending to his vegetable garden, and that it's not wise to mess with it in any way, shape or form. Further expanded on in future ventures.
• My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Forgotten Friendship introduces Wallflower Blush, a Canterlot High School student who's tending to a small garden on school grounds. She's rather proud of being in the gardening club, even though she's the sole member... and pretty much the only person to know about the garden. She proves to be a subversion of the trope, as she's actually the angry, embittered main villain of the special who sees the plants as the closest thing she has to friends and nearly wrecks Sunset Shimmer's life over her rage at feeling isolated. She gets better toward the end of the special, and she's later joined in the club by Derpy Hooves and Roseluck.
• Tom and Jerry: Blast Off to Mars: The first two NASA employees Tom and Jerry meet are a pair of men who have artistically decorated the lawn and nearby hedges, and are deeply upset when Tom and Jerry's antics start destroying their work.

Films — Live-Action

• Being There has Chance, a simple-minded gardener with no ambition outside of watching what's on the television. One of the only things he really seems to care about is gardening, and when men in power start warping his literal advice into metaphors concerning their policies, he quickly rises in social status.
• In The Constant Gardener, the protagonist is a British diplomat and an amateur gardener who spends a lot of time caring for plants. This is a way to show that he is a Nice Guy.
• In My Country: Anderson, the Malan gardener, seems to care a lot about his work. His own main grievance at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings is that two policemen cruelly broke five trees Anderson grew in his own yard out of frustration that they couldn't find Anderson's fugitive son.
• In Ophelia, the title character has a fascination with plants. She's kept potted plants on her bedroom windowsill since she was a child (her collection has grown substantially over the years), weaves flowers into her hair and demonstrates knowledge on plants and their properties and/or symbology, such as correctly identifying a flower as poisonous belladonna and her distribution of flowers and herbs based on what they symbolise. Her interest in gardening and nature helps underline her as nurturing and kind-hearted.
• In Saving Grace the widowed protagonist is a dedicated gardener. She won't even let a withering pot plant die because she wants to help the plant. This kicks off the story for the financially distressed woman.
• Solarbabies: The Warden uses some of his limited drinking water rations to make a flower grow in the middle of the desert. Strictor kills the flower just to be a jerk.

Literature

• Brother Francis, the gardener at the American Embassy in Good Omens, who teaches young Warlock about caring for all living things, even Brother Slug and Sister Potato Weevil. May in fact be St Francis of Assisi (except in the TV series, where he's Aziraphale in disguise.)
• Harry Potter:
  • Pomona Sprout is the professor of Herbology at Hogwarts. She’s a short, plump, and jolly witch who's also the head of Hufflepuff, the house of loyalty and friendliness.
  • Neville Longbottom is established early on as a timid boy with a spectacular green thumb. He's one of Harry's roommates, so he gets along with him fine to start with, but he becomes a more steadfast friend in the latter half of the series.
• Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings starts the story as the Baggins family's manservant, who takes care of the gardens and grounds among other things and he seems to enjoy it, given the Ring's temptation to him. He becomes Frodo's caretaker and protector while he's on the quest to destroy the Ring.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!:
  • After awakening her Past-Life Memories at age 8, Catarina takes up farming to both increase her affinity with earth magic and so she'll have a useful skill in the event that she gets exiled. Even after finding out that it wouldn't help her with magic at all, she continues to do it as a hobby well into her teenage years, much to the confusion of everyone around her.
  • Mary tended the flowers in her family's garden when she was younger, and it was Alan commenting on her green thumb that caused her to fall in love with him in the original game. Catarina ends up stealing that line by accident, befriending her in hopes that she could help with the wilting plants on her farm.
• Mary Lennox, the protagonist of The Secret Garden becomes this as the story progresses and she brings the titular garden to life. The once spoiled and melancholy orphan not only brings life to the garden but as she becomes a better person, she brings new life to the Craven household.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Geats: An antagonist example. Archimedel is the gardener of the Jyamato, the antagonists of the DGP. He grows and cares for the Jyamato like a Doting Parent would and thrives to create a world where they can live in peace at the expense of humanity.
• Star Trek:
  • Boothby is the groundskeeper at Starfleet Academy, and takes great pride in his plants. In addition, he's also full of advice that has saved at least one Space Cadet from getting into trouble — including one Jean-Luc Picard.
  • Kes takes care of the ship's hydroponics garden, with this trope often being combined with Innocent Flower Girl.
• Supernatural: When the Winchesters briefly die and go to heaven, Castiel has them search for Joshua, an angel who is Heaven's gardener and one of the few beings who has ever spoken to God. They find him tending the garden, which to their eyes is an Ohio botanical garden they visited as kids.
• Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga: Kengo Manaka, the main protagonist and Trigger's host, is a happy and cheerful botanist in a Mars colony who cares greatly for the plants he grows, but mostly his Martian soil-grown plant, R'lyeh.

Music

• The narrator of folk singer David Mallett's "Garden Song" certainly fits the bill. The lyrics poetically convey how tending a garden deepens one's connection with the natural world.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000: Horrifically subverted with the Garden of Nurgle, an Eldritch Location devoted to the concept of disease, corruption and decay filled with monstrous flowers. Nurgle actually is a caring gardener who loves life, it's just that bacteria, flies, rats and other vermin need love too.

Video Games

• Tsumugi Tsukioka from A3 learns gardening from his grandmother and really likes it. He treats his plants like his kids and often talks to them when tending to them, and is very familiar with flower language. Guy, his fellow Winter Troupe member, learns to be one from him as well.
• Animal Restaurant:
  • Prince the Gardener, according to his description, "lovingly waters every single flower."
  • The description of the Flower Shop booth has this to say about its owner:
    Shiba Liang is very gentle, even to flowers.
• In Ensemble Stars!, Hajime's family grow herbs, so he himself also does so as a hobby, and likes to put them into herb sachets or tea bags. He is also generally a very kind, soft-spoken, and gentle boy.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: while Dedue looks very intimidating, his truly kind and nurturing nature is revealed by his love of gardening, which is the focus of his and Byleth's support conversations. For him, it also has special meaning because he grows many plants native to his homeland of Duscur, which is now a wasteland, so gardening is a way to feel connected to his heritage and preserve some of its culture.
• Harvest Moon:
  • Nina from Harvest Moon is the sweet and perpetually happy daughter of the local florist.
  • Popuri from Harvest Moon 64 is Nina's granddaughter and is equally as bubbly. She helps her mother Lilia with flowers at their shop. One of the things that attracts her to Gray is that he plants flowers on his family's farm.
  • Celia/Cecilia from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (as well as the remake Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life) is technically more of a farmer than a gardener, but she's a sweet girl who loves working with crops and helping them grow.
  • Dean from Harvest Moon: Light of Hope is an incredibly nice guy who absolutely adores flowers. Luckily, his mother happens to run the local flower shop.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Geranium is one of the crew's Cultivators who works at Geoponics, and he's kind and caring towards his child, Sol.
• The Outer Worlds, Adelaide McDevitt is the leader of the Deserters and their faction at the Botanical Lab. When first arriving, Adelaide will welcome you with food, tea, and a place to rest. Somewhat subverted in that she has no compassion for Reed Tobson, due to his withholding medicine when her son was dying because company policy was that sick workers were not productive enough to deserve it. This is what caused her to leave Edgewater and establish her garden at the Botanical Lab in the first place.
• Persona 5: Haru Okumura is a polite, refined, and kind girl who keeps a gardening box on the roof of the school to grow plants. And growing your relationship with her will allow her to grow vegetables that are the best stamina-restoring items in the game. Though as the Phantom Thief Noir, she does have a ruthless side...
• In Plantasia, you play as Holly the fairy, helping the flowers to grow and protecting them from weeds and pests. The narrative notes that she is starting to care more about the flowers the more time she spends at the estate.
• Potion Permit:
  • Rue is a sweet young lady with a passion for gardening, which she pursues after being cured by you.
  • Bubble is a gentle park ranger who catalogues all the seeds and flowers of Moonbury, inspired by her late mother. She also keeps a garden outside her and Forrest's house, where you can check your progress towards collecting seeds to grow at home.
• In Seraphim Slum, Ezekiel is a twisted version of this. Not only does she care about her plants (which vomits out of her body into the slums), they grow and proliferate until they swallow the slum itself.
• Tattered World: Robin is the resident gardener, having gotten into the hobby as a child when her grandmother snapped her out of a Dumb Struck state by having her sing to a cabbage to help it grow better (when in reality, she stepped in to care for it behind Robin's back). She loves all plants greatly, having a quest where she agonizes over how few plants her home remnant of Hope has, and her caring nature extends to her friends, as she has a quote where she expresses that she often gives a friend of hers, Andre, a place to relax when he needs it.
• Undertale: Asgore, the kindly king of the Underground and Disc-One Final Boss, is fond of gardening. His throne room is filled with golden flowers, and he is seen watering them when the player first meets him.
  • In Deltarune, Asgore owns a flower shop on the surface.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Rose was liked gardening before her imprisonment, and cared about her fellow prisoner, Racoon, as well as the daughter of the Queen who had her imprisoned.
• Yandere Simulator: Uekiya Engeika, who's the leader of the Gardening Club, and gardens when she doesn't have anyone to look after. She's known as 'Everyone's Big Sister'.

Web Comics

• Izzy Pritchard of Ennui GO! maintains a veggie and flower garden on the roof of her office tower. Izzy is a Rich Bitch with a drug habit, nymphomania, and other self-destructive tendencies. She likes her little patch of greenery, as it calms her down.

Western Animation

• Pa in The Crumpets, who does gardening as his hobby.
• It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown! features Mimi, a girl whom Linus meets while out roller-skating. She absolutely loves tending to her flower garden, and is very knowledgeable about the species that she plants; she's also very friendly.
• Justice League: An Alternate Universe version of Poison Ivy was encountered by the Flash. She had a pleasant and passive demanour and had taken up a role as a gardener rather than her usual Eco-Warrior. This was of course due to her being lobotomised by Justice Lord Superman
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
  • Played straight with Perfuma, the hippie-ish princess of Plumeria, who's one of the kinder and friendlier princesses. While she has Green Thumb powers, she also seems to garden in general - in "The Valley of the Lost" she even complains about how hard it is to get it right when watering cacti.
  • Inverted with Shadow Weaver, who takes up gardening in season four without becoming any less of a Manipulative Bastard; as pointed out in this post (link contains season 4 spoilers), her garden, which she's constantly pruning, is a microcosm of how she treats people - she raises them to serve her own purposes, shapes their growth, and tries to cut away the parts that don't serve her ends.
• Steven Universe: Rose Quartz was the most caring member of her team, being the start of Gems caring about humans, and also has some plant-based powers, that she uses to garden.

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