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Growing Things: Gardening as Therapy, Part 2

© Brenda S. Parris

Gardening is wonderful therapy for people with Alzheimer's. "Since gardening stimulates memory through the use of all five senses-seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and sometimes tasting, it is well suited to the person with memory loss." [1] Gardening projects that Carmel Sheridan suggests are: [2]

1. Plant a terrarium
2. Window box flowers
3. Indoor vegetable garden
4. Indoor herb garden

Though Sheridan concentrates on indoor gardening, James R. Dowling favors the outdoor type. "Simply getting outdoors is at the most basic level of therapy. Most folks in the early to middle stages of dementia, and sometimes even beyond, still love and crave getting outside." [3]

Dowling suggests the following activities, though he warns that some of these may be too difficult in the middle stages of dementia. [4]

1. Raking leaves and grass clippings; sweeping/raking walkways
2. Pushing a wheelbarrow; moving/restacking firewood
3. Bucket brigade, can involve several, watering flowers and vegetables with plastic watering cans
4. Soil preparation with hand tools, spades, etc.
5. Planting seeds or seedlings; planting bulbs
6. Dead head, or pinch off dead blossoms

B.J. FitzRay suggests the following gardening activities. [5]

1. Add fertilizer or soil amendments to planting areas
2. Buy a plant kit - bulb in a box or planter, or others
3. Create deck gardens in barrels or wood planter boxes
4. Dig weeds
5. Raise African violets
6. Grow herbs in barrels or pots on a deck, porch, or indoors for use in cooking or sachets
7. Hoe
8. Make stepping stones from kits
9. Mist plants indoors and out
10. Paint flower pots
11. Pick vegetables, berries, and fruit
12. Place fertilizer sticks in potted plants
13. Plant a terrarium
14. Plant a rock garden using succulents and drought-tolerant flowers
15. Plant bulbs in pots for indoor spring blooms
16. Plant flowers in a window box
17. Plants seeds in outdoor beds, planter boxes, pots, or egg cartons
18. Pot plants
19. Prune/clip/pick dead leaves and flowers
20. Put fanciful, weather-resistant figurines among the flowers
21. Put whirlygigs or pinwheels along the garden path
22. Select seeds from catalogs
23. Set up a reflection/gazing ball
24. Shovel and turn soil
25. Sprout an avocado seed in a disk of water
26. Sprout beans in a jar
27. Start new plants from slips
28. Tie plants to stakes and trellises
29. Transplant seedlings
30. Visit a nursery

Mother touching a rose

Mother walking to see flowers

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