Blooming marvellous
Open Door - February 2008 pages 6-7
Paula Barrett
I am 39 and have had neurological problems since 2000. In my 'previous life' I was a personal assistant at a major brewery chain, mother of two and a music teacher. My illness has forced me to change my life and allowed me to discover new talents.
I am partially paralysed down the left side, have scleritis in my right eye and experience severe muscular spasms. At times, I feel like the very contorted willow which grows in a pot in my garden!
I like to take a positive approach as life is too short to dwell on what we can't influence. There is no point in having a glum face and feeling sorry for yourself. Days are very long spent like that and other people don't react well to misery.
I live in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and last year saw an advertisement for the 'Mansfield in Bloom' gardening competition. I have always liked to look at gardens but until I became a wheelchair user I never had the time to do much gardening myself. During the last seven years I have learnt to garden from scratch, making plenty of mistakes along the way! I have read a lot of magazines and have managed to remember tips my Grandad gave me when I was very little, helping him in his beautiful cottage style garden.
Five years ago, my husband and I moved to a lovely old house which has a reasonable sized garden that was ideal only for goats! Grass, grass and more grass. Oh, and just to add interest, lots of rubbish and nasty wild blackberry bushes.
Our initial concern was making the garden wheelchair accessible, so some of the grass was taken away, wide paths added and a gradual ramp installed making easy access from one level up to the next.
We inherited lovely old apple and greengage trees and developed a cottage garden look around these using a lot of old gates, chimney pots and the deep Belfast type sinks.
The gates have not only given us height and an excuse to grow ivy and clematis up and across them, but they are perfect for pulling myself up. They also split the garden into manageable 'rooms'. Psychologically, this is important because I can tend quite satisfactorily to one 'room' in a day rather than be disappointed by only managing a tiny area of the whole garden.
The sinks and chimney pots are raised on concrete blocks so that I can reach them really comfortably from my wheelchair. I am generally in my electric wheelchair, but on good days I wear overalls with knee pads incorporated which means I am able to crawl around the various areas in my garden.
All these items have been obtained from the local skip site at a very small cost. They have literally been thrown away by other people. Chips and cracks to the sinks or pots do not matter as ivy can be used to cover a multitude of sins. It also means that you create an individual garden which is unique to you.
Probably the biggest expense has been the two retractable hosepipes but these are priceless. I can water the garden from my wheelchair and the hosepipe retracts with me as I return back down the garden. This means that the hosepipe can't get wrapped around my wheelchair and I can stay relatively clean and dry.
We have covered all of the soil in a membrane which is then hidden with gravel. This keeps the weeds at bay and means that my time and energy are put into pruning and tidying plants rather than the thankless task of pulling out never-ending weeds.
Gardening doesn't have to be about taking out a second mortgage to buy all the plants in the garden centre! I have bought quite sorry looking plants late in the day from markets or from shops where they have been on sale for a while. They have been put on the 'hospital ward' and brought back to health with careful pruning, feeding and watering. I have bought a lot of small plants to keep the cost down and planted many bedding plants which I have grown from seed at a fraction of the cost of ready grown. I have used these as fillers until the small shrubs have become established.
I have a greenhouse where I grow many seeds and shelter tender plants. I take a lot of cuttings from shrubs, which keeps the cost down and gives me a lot of pleasure when I see what I have achieved.
When I entered the competition, I had visions of my methods causing the judges to shake their heads. Much to my delight they loved what they saw and, to my utter disbelief, I won Best Back Garden and an extra award of Best Overall Garden. There were over fifty entrants and I was the only one in a wheelchair. I had intended to campaign for a disabled category but when I was announced as the winner twice, the others at our table laughed and said, "You don't need a separate category now".
Since the competition I have spent a lot of time campaigning to make life more manageable for disabled people. Just because we are in wheelchairs, it doesn't mean that we can't garden. If a kitchen can be designed for a wheelchair user then so can a garden!
It is wonderful to watch my garden grow. I find gardening extremely therapeutic and it certainly helps to cheer me up on days where I perhaps feel a bit sorry for myself. I am convinced that gardening helps to keep me flexible and supple due to needing to reach that extra foot to tame some plant that thought it was safe in a dark corner. It really is fantastic to see the garden suddenly being transformed into a riot of colour or a patch with vegetables to eat with dinner.
For more information on gardening, see the new Stay Active pages
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