Gardening Therapy
Many of us garden just for the sheer joy of it. My wife gardens because she really loves it, the digging, the planting, the propagating, the weeding, and the harvesting. I do not enjoy most of that. But I love reading about it, seeing it, talking about it, walking in it, and above all planning out what we can do, how we can do it better and how we can make a significant capital improvement to our property.
For some time I hosted a radio program garden segment, helped by experts from Yates Horticultural. Just asking the experts gave me insights I wanted to try out. Virtually every aspect of vegetable growing, plant morphology, and common problems was discussed with listeners over the years.
Consequently, when my life ceased being spread over two full-time jobs taking more than a hundred hours weekly, I took a great interest in the garden. But I believe we should develop a garden that would benefit my wife and myself, as we grow older, and the work needs to become less demanding.
All over the country the healing aspects of gardening are being used as therapy or as an adjunct to therapy. This is not a new concept, because garden therapy has been around for decades. It simply is a means whereby people may develop well-being using plants. This means not just physical well-being, but also mental and psychological well-being, creating increased self-esteem and self-confidence for participants.
I have been actively involved in setting up gardening programs for thirty years to aid people recovering from major illness or injury, those with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and mental health problems, older people, offenders and those who misuse drugs or alcohol, to benefit from the therapeutic aspects of gardening as presented through specific therapy related programs. In most cases, those that experience the biggest impact are the vulnerable or socially excluded individuals or groups, including the ill, the elderly, and those kept in secure locations, such as hospitals or prisons.
One important benefit is that traditional forms of communication aren’t always required. This is particularly important for stroke patients, car accident victims, those with cerebral palsy, aphasia, or other illnesses or accidents that hinder verbal communication. Gardening activities lend themselves easily to communicative disabled individuals. This in turn builds teamwork, self-esteem and self-confidence, while encouraging social interaction.
Another group that clearly benefits from social and therapeutic horticulture are those that misuse alcohol or substances and those in prison. Learning horticulture not only becomes a life skill for these individuals, but also develops a wide range of additional benefits.
They produce food, in addition to creating skills relating to responsibility, social skills and work ethic, and the eating of their produce generates the feelings that farmers have always known. It is interesting that studies in both hospitals and prisons consistently list improving relationships between participants, integrating with the community, life skills and ownership as being some of the real benefits to them.
The health benefits of being outdoors, breathing in fresh air and doing physical work cannot be overlooked. Being outdoors creates feelings of appreciation, tranquillity, spirituality and peace. Gardening heightens those feelings.
Many charitable organizations seek to help people through sponsoring gardens as therapy. Mission Australia’s Inner City Housing Project, recently secured a plot in Woolloomooloo where on a four-square-metre patch of community garden on Dowling Street, Mission residents get out in the fresh air to enjoy a little gardening therapy. Residents suffering from mental illness, chaperoned by carers, weed and prune and “chit chat”. Herbs and vegetables provide food therapy. One resident said, “There have been beans – we steamed them and boiled them and fried them, they were so tasty. There were garlic, chives and rocket for a potato salad and cauliflower to cover in cheese and breadcrumbs.”
Some years ago, I led Wesley Mission into taking a long term lease on a Redfern hotel. I was attracted to the number of bedrooms it had, its kitchen, and its large bar space. It was de-licenced, the bar was turned into community space, and the bedrooms became bed-sits for more than a dozen homeless men and women from the inner city.
Here, at “The Pub with No Beer” as it was called, the residents also learnt how to cook good meals, how to live with minimum staff oversight, and how to grow flowers and vegetables. The gardeners learned to cook what they had grown. They did not then need to be nagged to give up two-minute noodles and to eat their greens.
Some years earlier, as Chairman of the Board at the Lottie Stewart Public Hospital at Dundas, I oversaw the installation of a sensory garden for those who were sight impaired. They could touch and smell blooms and fragrant plants. I followed this up with a number of other gardens for the disabled, including large-scale worm farms. Several of these were built using up all the scraps from our various restaurant kitchens, camp and conference centre kitchens, and from the kitchens of our nursing homes and retirement villages.
In Australia, over half of the household material that ends up at the tip is organic waste, and when it is buried can lead to groundwater contamination and the production of greenhouse gases. This practice is environmentally unsound and also wasteful because through natural processes this organic matter can safely and easily be converted into useful soil-building humus.
One of the best ways gardeners can break down organic matter is to use composting worms to convert food scraps into nutrient-rich, pH neutral worm castings, which produce a high quality soil conditioner. Almost any sturdy, waterproof container can be used. Worms are the most willing workers that can be found in the garden. Composting worms are a different type to the deep-burrowing earthworms that aerate the soil.
Composting worms are surface dwellers that thrive in the leaf litter layers in moist regions around the world. To increase numbers, ideal conditions have to be created. There are three common types of composting worms: Tiger worms, Indian Blues and Red Wrigglers. They can be difficult to tell apart, but all live quite happily together and all require similar conditions – cool, moist, dark, oxygen-rich environments with a regular supply of food.
Feeding fruit and vegetable scraps to earthworms is a cheap and simple way of recycling food and garden waste. Worm castings make a great fertiliser for gardens as does the liquid “worm wee”. Worm farms are ideal for people living in flats or houses with small backyards and for dealing with lunch scraps at the office.
Worms eat about half of their body weight in one day. The population in a well maintained worm farm doubles every two to three months. Soon, many of our centres and homes for children, disabled children, day care centres and the like, had dozens of boxes of worm farms. The children and the disabled particularly enjoyed feeding the worms daily. These were sold to local gardeners, as were the castings and the worm wee as top class fertilizer. This brought in remarkable sums of money. Before long, I discovered, that in urban Sydney I was our city’s largest vermiculturalist!
Then I ordered the establishment of gardens for the disabled. These gardens were established in large trays allowing wheelchairs to pull in underneath to enable disabled people to reach the plants for planting, weeding and harvesting. People with mental disabilities, and those with mental illness in our psychiatric hospitals, found the serenity and peacefulness of the garden a blessing as well as a therapy. Then we established community gardens in Retirement Villages so that if they desire, residents may continue their interest in gardening or start a new hobby.
In the dictionary, the definition for horticulture “is the cultivation of plants”. The definition of therapy is “the treatment of disease”. Garden therapy is holistic horticulture at it’s best: improving one’s physical, psychological, spiritual and social needs. It can improve mobility, exercise and socialisation skills. It does not matter in a garden if one cannot bend to pull out weeds, if one has no visual stimulation, if one cannot communicate verbally, or if one cannot remember the name of a plant or flower or what he/she was going to do next.
In gardening, exercise may be as gentle as sitting down at a table potting seeds/seedlings or quite strenuous as pushing a wheelbarrow or digging up a garden bed. Walking as you water with a hose in the garden is another form of exercise. Following a major change in lifestyle, be it due to age, retirement, illness, disease or injury; psychological behaviour may be improved in various ways. Motivation plays a major role in self-esteem. If self-esteem is low, one is not motivated to achieve personal satisfaction. Such garden therapy helps self-esteem.
At our home in Tumbi Umbi, my wife and I have a lot of opportunities for socializing. We have our church, our friends, provide hospitality through dinner parties, families events, a weekly breakfast with my senior minister, our home Bible study suppers, a regular business men’s breakfast, our pastoral care group morning tea and so on. Apart from that we have dozens of preaching and speaking engagements every year that take us into many fellowship groups.
We also have hobbies. Beverley is always busy with knitting, handcrafts, embroidery, crosswords, floral art, cooking and baking, early morning walking and above all gardening. As for myself, I am always occupied with writing, reading history, philosophy, theology, and biography, learning again water colour painting, making models, and with Beverley enjoying early morning walking, and of course planning gardens.
You can read about this planning and its results on http://www.gordonmoyes.com/2007/11/16/springs-the-crown-of-all-the-year/ I have explained about using the compost bin, recycling, mulching and watering on http://www.gordonmoyes.com/2007/08/23/practising-what-i-preach/
We recently built an additional large vegetable box to match an earlier one and like the flower boxes that are all elevated to waist high. Why all of these very physical buildings in the garden when we are both well and healthy and not needing garden therapy? For two reasons: first, being active now keeps us well and healthy both mentally and physically; and secondly, if we suffer impairment then we are well set up for the therapy of the garden. We could work in the glasshouse, the shade house, and attend the flower or vegetable boxes, even if in a wheelchair. We could still feed the chooks and ducks, collect the eggs, feed the fish and so on.
Garden therapy is good for us all, whether we need it or not.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
