Gardening has a strange way of finding people right when loneliness does, as if the two were always destined to meet at the same fence line. Princeton University researchers found that the happiness people report while gardening at home rivals what they feel biking, walking, or eating out, with the strongest boost showing up among women and lower-income households. Compassion and love tend to take root the same quiet way — one raised bed, one stubborn compost pile, one patch of wildflowers left wild for the bees.Here are 15 home gardening moments, small and ordinary on the surface, where kindness turned out to have been growing the whole time.