Sunday, September 12, 2010

Accessible Gardening: Tips & Techniques for Seniors & the Disabled

accessiblegardening
Amazon Average Customer Review: 4 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)

This is a very special book that will bring back the joy of gardening to people with disabilities. The first and most important obstacle that prevents people with physical impairments from enjoying the garden is basic access. Steps, grass paths, uneven pavers and level changes make wheelchair access very difficult.

"Accessible Gardening" provides solutions to these problems, together with a host of sources, government and non-government agencies, that will help offset the cost of adapting the home and garden for restricted mobility and other impairments.

Some of the advice may be too challenging for some people (the book strives to offer practical solutions so that people can do everything for themselves, including mowing and raking, carrying heavy loads and rolling compost bins), however most of the suggestions are common sense and very applicable, not only for disabled people, but also for people who are elderly or have back problems. A few of these suggestions are: lifting up flower beds to table height, placing soft barriers for safety, adapting regular gardening tools, planting for scent and texture so that people with visual impairments can enjoy the garden, placing textured or Braille markers around planting beds and recognizing plants by texture and fragrance, using PVC tubes for planting and adaptive watering edging, that performs two tasks at the same time (providing a neat and safe edge for your flower border and watering through a soaker hose system).

Everybody can benefit from advice such as selecting ground cover and wild meadow plants instead of grass whose care is very labor intensive and requires high water use, tips for selecting care free plants that will thrive with basically no care, and creating accessible places to rest in the garden. There are even a few professional tips for accessible garden design.

At the end of the book you will find appendices listing accessible public gardens in your area, and sources for information, tools and supplies. Please bear in mind that the book was published in 1997 and a some additional resources may be available now.

I was hoping to recommend the audio version of this book to people with visual impairments, but unfortunately much as I looked, I couldn't find one.
Posted by all-year-garden at 2:00 PM

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the art of waiting

You walk along the garden path one morning, look around and wonder where did it all come from. Naturally, you planted them all, or nearly all, with a few pleasant surprises here and there of self-sown perennials that sprung out from under annual growies before you got to notice them. Otherwise, though, the tall, stately beauties surrounding you are always taking you by surprise, because the first lesson in humility that is served to obstinate gardeners is the unwillingness of living things to develop according to your plans. They have their own internal clocks, their own environmental sensitivities and a completely different relationship with time than you. So, those lupines that you planted and thought dead sprung up on you two years later, after you planted cosmos over the following year, which self-seeded, and now both plants are gracefully mixing together in a fluff of stringy and palmed leaves, taking over an entire portion of your garden that you were intending for a completely different purpose this year. Or the snapdragons whose seeds you spread evenly over an area, but they decided to all come out bundled together to the left of the patch, leaving the rest of the dirt barren. Or the lily-of-the-valley that you tried to start from roots in the same spot for three years in a row, and now it decided to come out all at the same time and completely take over. Maybe you were planning, but your garden begs to differ. And when the garden and the gardener have different opinions, the garden usually wins. The struggling plant that you moved because you needed the space and didn't feel like throwing away now thrives in its new location with a vigor beyond expectations. Sun loving plants keep blooming in the shade behind the house, in a place that, of course, is not a showy feature of your garden. After a while, the oddities and surprises of your garden become familiar and dear to you, like an old friend's little idiosyncrasies warm up your heart after you haven't seen her in a while. A sense of peace descends upon the wiser gardener, a sense of acceptance that in this dialogue with nature, nature has something to say back to you. If those plants that you failed to recognize when you transferred them outdoors and planted them at the front of the flower bed turned out to be tomatoes, or if the sun garden you neatly organized according to height and flowering season exploded into a jumbled jungle of healthy growth, or if the miniature zinnias developed into four foot tall tree-like structures, or if all those tens of berries you saw on your strawberry plants were gone the second they turned slightly ripe because squirrels and rabbits believed in sharing, enjoy it, allow it, embrace it. If gardening only taught me one thing it would be the art of waiting. If you have enough patience and time, things kinda turn out the way you planned, sort of, eventually.

your private outdoors

Sitting at the table under the tree canopy, a book in one hand, the other hand mindlessly rubbing your temples, you lose track of time. The splotches of light filtered through the branches above move slowly opposite the sun path, while the day merges into evening. The light becomes gentler, more tired, almost horizontal. Around you two full walls, one half wall, a tree for a roof, and a balcony: your private outdoors. Noises come and go, the chirping of birds, the passing cars, people chatting while walking their dogs, the syncopated rhythm of joggers, the soft rubbery noise of bicycle wheels. The words on the page start fading as the evening shadow descends into the night, the contours are less precise, the contrast becomes nonexistent. Your cat comes around rubbing against your leg to remind you of dinner. The kids go in and out of the house abruptly, slamming doors, running down stairs and giggling plenty. Night flowering plants release their fragrance in the warmth of the day's end, and as light becomes more scarce, the sounds and scents intensify. The cat settles down in your lap, purring. Eerie little blue solar powered garden lights dot the darkened contours of the plant masses, and you discern more than you see the familiar garden path, the lilac bush, the archway above the gate. White flowers look like reversed shadows in the headlights of passing cars. The heavy summer night air, thick with humid fragrance, slowly cools down into a breeze.