Veeda Johnson has cerebral palsy, and until she discovered the Ralston Center garden, she had to settle for indulging her green thumb inside her apartment – with houseplants.

Now, she putters around outside, repotting, watering, deadheading to her heart’s content, easily maneuvering her wheelchair around the garden’s raised beds and planters packed with bright flowers and pungent herbs.

“I don’t mind getting my hands dirty,” says Johnson, 56.

The key here is that she can get her hands dirty. The garden at the Ralston Center, a nonprofit service organization for seniors in the 3600 block of Chestnut Street, is designed so that everyone, regardless of mental or physical disability, can fully enjoy its texture, fragrance and beauty.

They can work in it, too – as Johnson does, once or twice a week.

Gardens like this have many names: adaptive, enabling, universal design or access. Whatever the label, they’re an increasingly popular feature at hospitals and rehab centers, nursing homes and senior centers.

It’s easy to see why. So easy, you wonder what took so long for the trend to catch on.

Gardening stimulates the senses and gets people moving. It’s engaging and fun. And it’s very therapeutic.

“Gardens are non-threatening, non-discriminating and nonjudgmental,” says Joel Flagler, a horticultural-therapy professor at Rutgers University.

“Here, a person can have success even if they are discriminated against in the real world for having a disability or looking differently or being in a wheelchair… . Plants don’t care.”

These days, Debbie Freed is doing great with forearm crutches, using her wheelchair only to go long distances. But back in 1991, when she was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she despaired of ever experiencing the warmth and wonder of her garden again.

In her wheelchair, she couldn’t pick up a plant or carry it. She couldn’t bend down to her flower beds or reach into them.

“I remember feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. Everything was a production,” she says.

As part of her occupational therapy, Freed learned some of the tricks of adaptive gardening:

That raised beds, containers, window boxes, and hanging baskets on pulleys are easy to work with if you’re in a wheelchair or have limited mobility or stamina.

That specially made grabbers, forks and spades – or old tools modified with longer handles and better grips – work well even with traditional in-ground flower or vegetable beds.

That vines, herbs and perennials are less labor-intensive than others.

And that you can “carry” your tools and supplies around with you on a wheeled caddy.

Tending plants became fun again, so much so that Freed, 53, a mother of five from Skippack, enrolled in 2000 in a master gardening program specializing in adaptive gardening.

“No matter what your disability is,” she says, “there’s something for you in the garden.”

And it’s not all about planting.

Lamb’s ears feel soft and fuzzy, “hens and chicks” hard and waxy. Basil and mint leaves burst with fragrance when rubbed. And if you’re very still, you can enjoy those special garden sounds – the ripple of busy wind chimes, the swooshing of ornamental grasses in a breeze.

Freed helped design a new “universal accessible garden” at the Penn State Cooperative Extension office in Collegeville. But it’s not just for seniors or people with disabilities; it also illustrates ways to make growing things fun for children and for people who garden in small spaces.

The project was the brainchild of Mary Concklin, a horticulture educator at the Collegeville facility.

“Anyone can garden, no matter what your situation or the size of your space,” Concklin says.

The Collegeville garden has an unusual vertical feature made with a wood frame, wire mesh, and moss. The frame is filled with the moss, which is held in place by the mesh. Plants go right through the mesh into the moss – sideways. Gardeners can sit beside or lean against the structure, which is four feet high and five feet wide.

There’s a garden of window boxes placed on a five-step stair riser, which is inverted to make the step platforms steeper and narrower. And a flower bed made of fake blocks. And raised beds built at different heights and angles to accommodate wheelchairs.

The beds should be filled with “sensory plants” that have a nice color, feel or smell and are nontoxic – no foxglove, in other words.

“The garden should be a familiar, comfortable place,” says Jack Carman of Medford, a landscape architect who designs therapeutic gardens.

He believes that with more seniors wanting to stay in their own homes, the demand for adaptive or universal gardens will only grow.

It’s not just the older crowd, though. Many doctors, social workers, and psychologists now strongly support the idea, buttressed by research, that time spent in the garden helps heal wounded bodies and souls.

Freed knows that firsthand. With the retooled garden in Collegeville, she says, “people are going to see that there is a new way to do something they used to enjoy.

“It will bring the joy back.”

By Virginia A. Smith
Inquirer Staff Writer

Μεταφράζεται από την Ζαφειρία Κωστοπούλου…