Good Health: It Just Might Grow on Trees
Hovering up there among the Top 10 people in the world with whom you don’t want to trade places is the Prince of Wales. That’s right, the guy who measures his money by the ton, shares housekeeping with the world’s sweetheart, screeches around in an Aston Martin and can have his tailor beheaded if his pants don’t fit. The man has to be miserable. He gets no slack.
Charles pays for all those perks. He opens more shopping malls than a third-rate kiddie-show host, puts up with more bowing and scraping than most religious statues, and can’t make a goofy face in public without it showing up, double life-size, on the cover of every penny-dreadful tabloid in London the next morning.
And, with carnivorous regularity, the tabs bore in on his penchant for gardening, branding it as a pretty wimpy pursuit for the chap they used to call Action Man.
But let’s be honest and call his forays into the underbrush at his home at Highgrove what they are: therapy. After a day of fulfilling the duties of a trainee king, what better activity than pulling on a pair of green Wellies and wading into the compost? Gardening is, after all, just slightly more stressful than a Swedish massage.
The folks at the Fullerton Arboretum are old hands at this idea, and now they are beginning to delve into it a bit more deeply. For years, volunteers and others have been showing up at the arboretum to dig in the dirt and make green things grow, all in the pursuit of a good time and good mental health. Now they’re going to study that appeal.
Today, from 9 a.m. to noon, the arboretum and the Continuing Learning Experience at Cal State Fullerton are sponsoring a seminar on what they call horticultural therapy. Designed for clinicians, educators, recreational and occupational therapists, gerontologists, health care providers and just plain plant folk, the seminar will look at how the cultivation of plants can be used not only to maintain an even mental strain, but to aid in rehabilitation of the disabled.
Also, plans are afoot to turn the southern end of the arboretum, the section closest to the CSUF campus, into an example of a garden that can be more easily worked by those with physical disabilities.
On the emotional side of things, the arboretum staff--not to mention Prince Charles--considers gardening and horticulture not simply as a cure for sickness, but as a maintainer of wellness.
“The act of taking a seed or plant and nurturing it and watching it grow can bring people out of depression,” said Lorra Almstedt of the Friends of the Fullerton Arboretum. “This is something every gardener has always known, and now we’re putting a name to that: horticultural therapy.”
What many gardeners may not know, however, is that gardening can also be therapeutic for those who cannot use their legs to push on a shovel, or reach over the arm of a wheelchair to pull weeds from a flower bed. Many physical disabilities, said Almstedt, can be accommodated by a few neat gardening tricks.
The overriding rule that applies to a garden that is used for physical therapy or tended by a disabled person is that everything must be within easy reach. Bending, stretching, heavy lifting, inaccessibility--all are out. What does that leave? Quite a lot:
* The vertical wall garden. Think of planter boxes on shelves. Many plants can be grown in small containers that fit neatly into a kind of vertical lattice work. They can be individually removed and tended, then replaced with no bending or reaching.
* Raised planters. These can be in the form of beds that are built up to around waist height with, for instance, a wall of railroad ties. They must not be too deep to be reached from a wheelchair, however, and their edges can be used as a seat or as support for the gardener.
* Raised pots. The more usual large free-standing pot would sit near the ground and involve bending and reaching, but how about a group of plants potted in soil that’s contained in a length of ceramic sewer pipe? Sounds crazy, looks great, and raises the plants to the perfect height.
* Rain gutters. A length of galvanized rain gutter can be attached to a fence at the perfect reachable height and makes a perfect container for small plants.
* Hanging plants. They might usually be out of easy reach, but not if they’re hanging by a line that is run through pulleys to a tie-off on a pillar or wall.
* “Enabling tools.” These are garden tools adapted for the disabled. Most are conventional tools with extender attachments for reaching or special easy-to-hold grips, but others are highly specialized. There are, for instance, spades with raised buttons so a blind gardener can tell just how far into the soil the spade has sunk, and ratcheted pruning shears that can snip through the thickest plants with very little pressure.
Naturally, these adaptations take much of the inconvenience out of gardening for disabled people and must surely make the process a lot more fun and relaxing. Which, as any heir to the throne of England can tell you, is the point in the first place.
And there’s even one more peace-of-mind benefit that comes from tending a fine garden. Unless your last name is Windsor, you’ve got virtually no chance of showing up in the Sun or the Mirror and being called a milquetoast because you talk to your plants.
Unless, of course, they start talking back.
