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Gardens in Retirement Homes Help Elderly to Relive their Salad Days
By
David Curry, Canberratimes.com
May
31, 2009
Jack Atkins, 78, waters lettuce at the Goodwin Village independent living units at Ainslie.
For some elderly people, the hardest thing about moving into a retirement home is abandoning their garden. It's not just the garden itself, but also the process of planting and nurturing the plants that means so much.
The therapeutic value of gardening is increasingly being recognized. A recent Dubbo study of risk factors for dementia found that daily gardening predicted a 36 per cent lower risk. The study recommended daily exercise, ''especially daily gardening'', as a way to reduce the incidence of dementia.
One elderly woman is so concerned about losing her access to a garden that she has written to Goodwin, a company that owns three Canberra retirement villages, about including a community garden in the redevelopment of Monash Lifestyle Village, where she plans to live.
Ethel, who didn't want to use her real name, has a vision of chickens, a compost heap and a sprawling garden full of vegetables and other plants much like the one she left behind.
''It's hard leaving a home with a garden and trees. It's a lovely escape to go down and pick your own apricots, and to have some little chooks,'' she said.
Goodwin Lifestyle Village in Ainslie has a raised community garden for the residents, so that bending is not required, but the redevelopment plans at Monash do not include a communal garden. Goodwin chief executive officer Bruce McKenzie acknowledged the garden at Ainslie had been very successful.
''It has the fastest-growing vegetables I've ever seen in my life it gets so much love and attention,'' he said.
Mr McKenzie said he was working with the landscape architect to incorporate some form of communal gardening into the Monash development, in response to the interest from residents.
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