Gardens throughout the country this summer have suffered in the heat.
But Susie Marshall’s back-yard vegetable garden in Jessamine County, Ky., remains her fountain of youth.
“I get up in that garden and I can stay for hours,” said Marshall, 88, who raises corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons and cantaloupe. Marshall, who plants or harvests from early spring to late autumn, picked 3 gallons of blackberries on a recent morning.
Her erect bearing, easy movements and enormous energy belie her years.
“I take my hoe and go up there, I don’t have a pain,” she said.
Marshall is among many older people who credit their good health, long life and positive outlook to digging, hoeing and lifting in their gardens.
Jim Concotelli, executive director of the Lexington Wellness Center in Lexington, Ky., said that’s a good plan. To reap benefits of physical activity, he said, exercise doesn’t have to be overly strenuous.
“Just 30 minutes of moderate activity daily reduces your risk of dying from the leading causes of death–heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke–by 50 percent,” he said.
“Certainly, gardening falls into that category,” said Dr. David Gater, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington.
Benefits also include reducing the risk of osteoporosis, improving strength and endurance, helping maintain muscle mass and reducing fat, Gater said.
With hoeing, raking or picking up fallen tree limbs, you’re stretching in different ways, said David Hoke, manager of UK’s wellness program.
There’s also a component of resistance training when shoveling and pulling weeds, he said.
Marshall, who retired 26 years ago after working at a department store, a hospital and for state government, has had few ailments.
“I’ve had problems like other people,” she said. “But I spring right back.”
When Leola Stone feels under the weather, her prescription is to head outdoors.
“Oh, listen, if I feel bad, I come out here and work all day, till I’m exhausted,” said Stone, whose yard is 310 feet deep. “I go in the house and whatever it was is gone. I feel great.”
Stone is 91 and a retired employee of a federal narcotics hospital.
She lifts 40-pound bags of potting soil but hires a man to help her “do the heavy stuff.”
“I work like a field hand. It agrees with me,” she said.
A former dancer in a vaudeville chorus line, Stone still moves with the grace and suppleness of a much younger person.
Gardening, while it improves the body, also is a meaningful, creative endeavor that promotes a sense of emotional well-being, said Dr. Teresa Gevedon, director of UK’s outpatient clinic in the medical center’s Department of Psychiatry.
“Psychologically, it promotes a feeling of being productive because people see the fruits of their labor pretty immediately,” she said.
“That’s very satisfying. For a lot of people, their work is one part of a bigger project that may not be completed for months or years. But with gardening, the results are fast and obvious.”
There’s a spirituality to being part of nature’s cycles, Concotelli said, to getting your hands in the dirt and planting a seed, fertilizing it, watching it grow, harvesting the fruit. Then at the end of the season, turning the spent plants back into the ground.
“There’s a tremendous communion with nature. It helps us understand ourselves a little bit better,” he said.
“Makes you feel part of God’s world,” said Evelyn Wilson, 84, who gardens with Ruth West, 85, in Scott County, Ky.
West and Wilson became acquainted when Wilson moved to Georgetown, Ky., in 1992 to be near her daughter, Jan Crouch, and son-in-law, William Crouch, president of Georgetown College. The women were in the first master gardener class offered by Scott County Cooperative Extension agent Mark Reese that year.
They have a huge vegetable garden on West’s farm in the country, “everything from peanuts to corn,” Wilson said. “But squash is our specialty,” West said.
These two, both former educators, are brimming with so much energy that in addition to gardening, they take a fall and spring exercise class called Body Recall, specifically designed for older people. Each also walks, Wilson for 45 minutes five days a week.
“I can’t stay in the house,” Wilson said. “I’m an outdoor person.”
