BY KIMBERLY MAYER
Nine years ago, when my father was ninety-one years old and recovering from quadruple bypass heart surgery, he spent some time in a rehabilitation center near the retirement village where he lived with my mother in Duxbury, Massachusetts. I remember being startled at first by how frequently the word “rehab” was bandied about by their crowd. It took me awhile to appreciate that these stays had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. My father’s stay, it turned out, had everything to do with gardens.
The month was September and the weather was mild. Mom and I visited dad in turns daily, and when it was my turn I knew I was giving her much needed time alone or with her friends. So I spent some time. Every day I wheeled dad out to a courtyard in the center of the complex, where I pulled up a chair and, with a navy blue lambswool throw over his lap and a gray herringbone wool cap on his head, we settled in for a good bit of the afternoon. We spent no time whatsoever in his room, and I can’t even tell you whether or not he had a roommate. But our time in the courtyard is as clear as can be.
Memory, it turns out, has a far stronger relationship to place than it does to time. I know this to be true because in order to write this, I had to rely on my sisters to recall the month and year for this particular rehab stay. Toward the end there were so many.
Surrounded by a brick building on all four sides, the courtyard was concrete underfoot with a couple patches of soil. A rhododendron shrub grew in each patch. So Dad and I started with that. Our job, the one we gave ourselves each day, was to dream up a courtyard garden. Just the two of us. There were other patients scattered about but as we didn’t know them, we enjoyed an anonymity, and of course, reported to no one. In this way we took ownership of the lot.
“Look at how the rhodies thrive here, let’s do more of that,” I don’t know which one of us said it. We were thinking like one from the start.
And so we began in that concrete courtyard, designing a garden in our heads. Creative play, day after day. Neither touching a hoe nor getting dirt in our fingernails, just thinking like a gardener together. No boots, no gloves, no kneeling pad—or knee pads, as my father would have worn. No deer here, no rabbits to devour everything green. But the sun on our faces and fresh air in our hair, for gardening is also about being in a garden, albeit in our minds’ eye.
Each day we took our place and picked up where we’d left off. Dreaming it, improving it, growing it, we made the courtyard garden ours. Did dad share this with mom in her visits? Probably not. I never heard a word about it from anyone.
What dad and I felt in our hearts was that a garden at the rehabilitation center would do more than all the staff, more than all the meds, more than anything, for the patients. We just knew it at the time, and I have since learned this to be true. In 1984 the pioneering environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich conducted the first such study, View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery. In a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania two groups of patients recovering from the same surgery were studied. The windows in the rooms of one group looked to a brick wall, the other, to leafy trees. “The patients with a view of trees fared better; they had lower levels of stress, more positive mood, required fewer doses of pain medication, and were discharged on average a day sooner.” (The Well Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature, by Sue Stuart-Smith). And that was simply given a view.
Consider the recovery with an outdoor space, such as a courtyard, to bring the outdoors in. Architecture could be doing this, but it isn’t, not enough. Gardening-wise, it can be as simple as planting trees, vines, or broadcasting seeds. In her book, Growing Myself, Judith Handelsman reminds us, “In the not too distant past, the healing power of gardens was a matter of course. European sanitoriums incorporated time in their gardens as an essential part of the cure. It is only with modern medicine’s dependence on taking a pill that we have lost the belief in healing through osmosis by basking in the presence of nature.”
If indeed dad and I had been “basking in the presence of nature,” all of this would be more understandable. But in our case the courtyard at the rehabilitation center was all but barren. Similarly, E.B. White described his wife Katharine S. White “laying out of the spring bulb garden” in the Introduction to her book, Onward and Upward in the Garden:
Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that has been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and weather, … sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
I don’t want to overstate it, but gardens have always been about both the real and the imagined. Ask any gardener. And an imagined garden, it turns out, can be healing too.
My father was soon released from the rehabilitation center, moving back into the retirement village in Duxbury with my mother, and then to a more assisted care facility near Boston. There he contracted Covid 19 and died, nearly five years after our time together in the rehab courtyard. I consider that imagined garden dad’s last garden because his plot of land in life kept shrinking. In the end it was the 11 x 6 inch birdfeeder mounted on his bedroom window that came the closest to being a garden. Blue jays, sparrows, cardinals, and chickadees, his joy in them immeasurable.
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 