My Aging Back (and Knees, Neck, Hands, etc.)

September 9th, 2014

One thing I’ve noticed lately is that gardening doesn’t get any easier as backs age and energy levels fade.

An aging George hard at work in the garden.

I used to get sore after a whole day of mulching. Now I can wake up sore for no apparent reason.

As I’ve been throttling back and trying to keep pace, I’ve begun to ask myself the question that all rapidly aging gardeners eventually do: “What am I going to do when I can’t get out there and dig, plant, mulch and prune as I used to?”

Lifelong gardener and ailing-hip author Sydney Eddison wrote a wonderful book about that topic several years ago after her husband died and she ended up trying to cope alone with more than an acre of gardens in her Connecticut country yard.

Her book “Gardening for a Lifetime” (Timber Press, $19.95 hardcover) offers lots of practical tips for streamlining labor and rethinking the gardens.

One point she made that really struck home with me was one uttered by violinist Itzhak Perlman after he played through a string breakage during a New York concert.

Despite the setback, Perlman said afterward that “sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

“Making the most of what you have left is also the older gardener’s task,” Eddison says. “How beautiful can you make your garden with the resources you still have at your command?”

Some of her suggestions:

Simplify. “If one genus or species monopolizes your time and dominates your garden, think about reducing its number,” Eddison suggests.

Walk the garden to identify plants that self-sow annoyingly, that regularly get diseased or that require a lot of deadheading, dividing and staking.

Lean toward types that have healthy, good-looking foliage all season and that have low work demands (sedum, amsonia, liriope, agastache, ornamental grasses, for example).

Gravitate toward shrubs. “Shrubs need pruning only once or twice a year instead of the regular deadheading and frequent division required by daylilies and many other perennials,” Eddison says. “Woody plants are infinitely less trouble.”

Compact shrubs like fothergilla ‘Mt. Airy’ are much less work than flower beds.

Especially look for compact shrubs with colorful foliage that aren’t prone to bugs and disease (dwarf Virginia sweetspire, dwarf hydrangeas, fothergilla, dwarf spirea, etc.)

Gravitate toward groundcovers. Colonies of low, spreading groundcover plants require less time than lawns and don’t require ongoing mulch.

They’re especially useful in the dry shade under trees. Good choices there include barrenwort, ferns, hosta, hardy ginger, Solomon’s seal, goats beard, helleborus, brunnera, foamflowers, creeping phlox and Hakone grass.

Make lists. Do walk-abouts to assess what needs to be done, then prioritize.

“Instead of going outdoors and being so overwhelmed by the enormity of what has to be done, you can choose one thing and actually get it done,” says Eddison.

It’s also satisfying to check items off the to-do list, she adds.

Mulch is your friend. It’s a heavy-duty job, but keeping 2 to 3 inches of mulch on garden beds saves much weeding and watering later.

When that work becomes too much, Eddison suggests mulching as one of the first jobs you might consider hiring out.

Re-evaluate expectations. Is that zero-tolerance weed policy in the lawn really wise? Do the beds really need to be edged? Does every last leaf really need to come out of the gardens?

“At heart, I’m a perfectionist, which I used to think was laudable,” says Eddison. “It isn’t. It’s laughable to expect perfection in a garden, which never remains static.”

Hire help. If you can afford it, take on a helper – even if it’s only for the heaviest jobs or only for a few hours here and there.

Eddison says good sources are community colleges, Extension offices, vo-tech schools and any institution that offers classes in horticulture. Gardeners-in-training might appreciate the hands-on experience at an affordable fee.

Pick your battles. “I used to fight against giving an inch and tried to hang onto everything, from ailing plants to crisply cut edges around all the beds,” Eddison says.

Sometimes plants and whole gardens are best removed or at least converted to something less labor-intensive. Maybe those hedges should just be allowed to grow.

“There are times when you might as well bite the bullet,” says Eddison. “A choice must be made to either hang on, which can be a costly battle, or let go, which can be sad.”

Switch to pots. “For anyone who can’t do the heavy labor of in-the-ground gardening, gardening in containers can provide much of the same pleasure,” she says.

Save energy elsewhere. Sometimes getting help with other life tasks frees time and energy to devote to the garden.

And if things really get overwhelming, consider down-sizing to a smaller place with more manageable gardens.

One other aid I can recommend is to look for better, sharper and/or better designed tools that suit better as you age. That can include replacing hand tools with gas- or electric-powered ones, or switching to tools that are ergonomically designed for aging or disabled bodies.

The New York Times featured a good article on that topic last year in which the writer interviewed three gardening experts for their ergonomic-tool recommendations.