Miley Cyrus on How Gardening Keeps Her ‘Grounded in My Sober Lifestyle’

Miley Cyrus is opening up about her passion for gardening and how it helps her maintain an important practice in her life. 

The “Jaded” singer, 32, got candid about how the “very personal process” of taking care of her garden helps her keep a sober lifestyle while speaking to Pamela Anderson for CR Fashion Book‘s new issue.

“Gardening is something you do for yourself. When we’ve shared so much of ourselves, having those little precious times with something simple — like putting a seed in the ground and nurturing it — it becomes a very personal process,” Cyrus tells Anderson in the interview released on Sept. 22.

She then gets deeper into the positive impact gardening has had on her, including how it has become like a “medicine” for her in her sober journey. 

“Having that has been the medicine that’s kept me grounded in my sober lifestyle,” she adds. “It’s part of a practice, the way yoga might be: getting out into nature, doing something with my hands, and having a creative outlet that isn’t about fame or success.”

She notes how it’s a “genuine win” to put seeds in the ground and actually see flowers grow in the spring. She was inspired to do that at her own home, she says, thanks to photographer Vijat Mohindra.

“I did that on a hillside a while ago. I was leaving for a tour, and I just threw seeds out, thinking maybe when I came home something magic would happen. And it did,” she explains. 

Referring to Mohindra, Cyrus adds, “He threw these seeds, and I swear it never would’ve happened without him. When I came back, there were 10,000 daisies. I was like, ‘We didn’t even throw these out—why do I have 40 species of roses in my backyard?’ I came back and my whole hillside looked like a princess fairy garden.”

She also credits her mom, Tish Cyrus, for exposing her to gardening and always having plants in the house while she was growing up. 

“My dad always said our house looked like an old folks’ home, because she’d have flowers in every single room — that was very ’90s, with all the potpourri,” she recalled. “My mom always loved flowers; she always had them around the house. But it was simple gardening.”

Miley adds that her mom started to become an “incredible gardener” during the COVID-19 pandemic, when “she really discovered something unique” about her gardening abilities. 

“A plant could be dead for a year, and she’ll bring it back to life,” the “Something Beautiful” singer says. 

Miley, who has been on her sobriety journey since 2019, recently opened up about how the importance of staying sober is one of the reasons why she has “no desire” to tour anymore. 

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“I do have the physical ability and I have the opportunity to tour. I wish I had the desire but I don’t,” she said in an interview with Good Morning America that aired on Tuesday, July 15.

“There’s artists like Prince that are not here today that lived such a high intensity lifestyle on the road,” she added. “It’s really hard to maintain sobriety on the road, which is a really important pillar of stability in my life.”