03/10/2026
I’ve been pretty tired lately...
Having a young child is funny like that. You can be getting enough done, functioning normally, having a good day, but there’s still this underlying tiredness that seems to follow you around!
And I’ve noticed how much it changes the little things. You’re more easily irritated, you have less patience, your head feels a bit slower and things that normally wouldn’t bother you can suddenly seem like a much bigger deal than they really are. Nothing is necessarily wrong, you’re just not quite operating under the same conditions.
It got me thinking about plants and all the little environmental stresses we probably overlook because they aren’t dramatic enough to notice…
Take an outdoor light, for example. A security light or street light shining onto a plant all night might not be enough to kill it or even make it look obviously unhealthy. But the plant is responding to light as information as well as energy. Darkness is part of its environment too, and that change between light and dark helps regulate all sorts of processes.
So if you’ve got a plant sitting under artificial light every night, it may still grow perfectly well. But it’s not necessarily experiencing the same environment as a plant that gets a proper night.
I find that interesting because it’s a bit like being tired…
You can keep going. You can still function. You can still grow, in a sense… but the conditions matter, even when the effect is small.
I think we look for stress in the garden as something obvious… like yellow leaves, pests, disease, stunted growth. However there can be much quieter forms of stress happening long before we see anything like that.
And maybe that’s one of the useful things about being a bit tired yourself... You become more aware of how much small changes in the environment can affect the way a living thing behaves!
