I wouldn't call it gardening. More landscaping. No neat borders or such at our place, it's pretty wild. It's officially a birdwatch mini bird reserve. Meaning all the unorganized heaps of branches, bushes, old trees etc. are there to please the wild animals. Ahem. Still, when we started 14 years ago, it was 6000 sq m (1.5 acres) of broom. Just broom, 3 metres high and too dense to penetrate. Now it's a park of sorts, and given that the ground here is mostly granite and in some places extremely hard packed soil, any tree we planted needed hours digging with a pick axe. I reckon we now have about 50. The broom still wants to reconquer the place (we had it taken care of originally by a couple of guys with properly equipped tractors who cut it all down and chopped it up in situ, after which we had a totally empty field with a border of trees on two sides and some thorn bush along the road; but there was a century worth of broom seeds in the soil...).
In practice, SWMBO takes care of 99% of the veggy gardening bit, and most of the other detailed work. She knows all about seeding and growing plants, especially ones you can eat or use to make herbal tea with.
Mowing the field with a mini tractor type mower won't work as there are far too many rocks and mole heaps. So we have two donkeys who take care of the grass, but unfortunately they don't eat the young broom so we still have to pull those out by hand or by pick axe. Donkeys don't need petrol, but still need care and of course they turn the mowed grass into shit. Which makes great compost, but one has to gather it up and carry it by the ton to the compost heap. My main jobs in this 'garden' are shoveling donkey manure and mowing the grass outside the donkey compound, using either a scythe or a portable power mower. And I like observing how it all turns into a new ecosystem that we are part of.
https://plus.google.com/photos/10695...30689247596242

So it's important, not so much as a hobby but as something that is part of rural life - having land means you need to put work in to keep it at least more or less under control, and allowing it to be an effective habitat.