“If you’re a gardener,” said Caroline Jacobson, a horticulture therapy volunteer from Wheaton, “you’ve got to be able to dig in the dirt.”
Stating the obvious? Perhaps, but what if a gardener, through injury, illness or permanent disability, is no longer able to work the soil? Must a lifelong passion be put aside?
No, agree horticulture therapists, who say that the nurturing of plants is not only a hobby that can be adapted to special needs, but is one that can even give new purpose to life and speed recovery.
“It’s the thing about renewal. You plant a seed, and it will grow and blossom. It gives something to look forward to,” explained Jacobson, who volunteers at Wheaton’s Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital. “There’s something about gardening, about getting your hands in the dirt. It just goes right through you and gives you more strength.”
While able-bodied people can get down and dig in the dirt, handicapped people often have difficulty gardening at ground level. “They need raised beds so they can work in them from a wheelchair,” Jacobson said. “They need places where they can go that are wheelchair accessible.”
Such places are rare, but one local community recognizing those needs is Downers Grove, where the park district is offering raised plots for the disabled for the first time this year. Thanks to $6,000 in donations, four elevated beds were built to allow access to gardeners in wheelchairs. The plots are alongside the park district’s other public gardening area.
Such a service is a good idea, said Claire Kalpakjian, vocational counselor for the Premier Rehabilitation Center of Chicago, which is located a block from the special plots. The center, a rehabilitation facility for people with head injuries, has rented one of the elevated gardens. Kalpakjian said she anticipates the benefits for her clients will be many.
“For people with head injuries, the functioning in all areas is usually decreased, so gardening is good for using and strengthening the hands,” Kalpakjian said. “But a lot of times just doing a normal thing, something that isn’t clinical inside the walls of a hospital or facility, is therapeutic in itself.
“Gardening gives clients something they can tend to, instead of always being the one who gets the therapy,” Kalpakjian said. “They can care for something else, even if it’s just a plant. It sounds rather trivial, but it’s so important.”
Randy Kirchoff, a Premier resident, said, “When I was a little boy, we had a big garden out in the back yard, and I used to love it.” Now he’s enjoying working in the new garden plot. “I learn a little bit about plants,” he said, “and it’s a good thing to get out and stretch my bones.”
Downers Grove’s project borrows from the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, where the country’s first adaptive garden was put on exhibit in 1976. The exhibit continues to be a model for barrier-free gardening and displays about 50 gardening tools that have been customized for the disabled.
“Certainly if we all live long enough, gardening in the traditional sense will become a little bit more difficult,” because of the physical limits of age, said Gene Rothert, manager of urban horticulture for the botanic garden and author of “The Enabling Garden,” a how-to book for those with disabilities. Rothert, who is president of the American Horticultural Therapy Association, suggested that fence-mounted planters or longer tool handles might mean the difference between continuing and giving up a rewarding hobby.
“Many scientists are beginning to point to almost an instinctive need we have for natural areas,” Rothert said. “The idea is that we probably all evolved outdoors and not in these concrete jungles that we have.”
That call of the wild should not be denied to the handicapped either. “People with disabilities or older adults don’t have the mobility to get out into our wilderness areas, so they need to look more toward their immediate surroundings for that type of satisfaction,” Rothert said.
Disabled children benefit as well. “It’s a wonderful thing for a child,” Jacobson said. “Maybe they can’t run and play baseball, but they could have the best garden in the whole place.”
