The key to long life? Gardening
Want to live to a ripe old age? With spring coming, here’s my advice. Skip vitamin pills. Avoid self-help books penned by irritating know-it-alls. Turn off the TV. And don’t go running — or crippling yourself in sweaty gyms.
Get out into the fresh air instead. Become a gardener.
It is not, alas, fashionable nowadays to espouse nurturing a garden as the route to longevity. But here’s ample proof that it works.
Meet three old people (let’s not shy away from the word, folks) who are healthy, curious and active every day and clearly still getting a kick out of life. And what do they have in common? They all love gardening.
First, there’s Ralph Burgess. He’ll be 90 in August, but still works almost every weekday at his family’s garden centre, Little Gardens, in Parry Sound, Ont. Sometimes you’ll find him in the greenhouse, potting up transplants, a job he loves. Other times, he’s in the office, tackling paperwork (not half as much fun). He quips: “I’m the second-lowest paid employee here. The lowest is my son, Ian, who runs the business now.”
Yet Burgess has no intention of quitting. He enjoys talking to customers and learning what’s new in horticulture. He doesn’t ever see himself parked in front of a flat-screen TV all day.
Nor does Rose Huber, also nearly 90, of Guelph, Ont. She raised five children single-handedly after her farmer husband died prematurely of a heart attack — and attributes much of her staying power to having a garden all her life.
“I grew up with gardening and it keeps you exercised in a pleasant way. There’s no pressure. You can go outside and do a bit whenever you feel like it,” she says.
Huber still plants a full vegetable garden every spring. She enjoys making
Skip vitamin pills. Avoid self-help books penned by irritating know-it-alls. Become a gardener
fresh salads with the results and favours tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, potatoes and green beans. She also does most of the maintenance herself.
Finally, there’s professional horticulturist Dr. Bernard Jackson. At 82, he’s part of a team installing a new scree garden on Dalhousie University’s agricultural campus in Truro, N.S. (More on this interesting venture in a future column).
Jackson did quit working for a bit. He retired to Scotland at 60, after a career spent mostly at Memorial University in St. John’s, where he founded the Newfoundland Botanical Garden. But he got bored and returned to the East Coast. Now he’s gung-ho about the as-yetunnamed Truro public garden, which will focus on alpine plants and is a first in Canada.
“I have the bit between my teeth again,” he says, with a happy chuckle.
I met Jackson last fall along with two Dalhousie staff, Darwin Kerr and Jeff Morton, who are spearheading the garden project. As they chatted excitedly about rare species of gentians and 500 tons of granite (acquired at a bargain price from a local quarry), Jackson kept bending over to pull out weeds. He seemed remarkably supple for a man his age, and put me in mind of an old Chinese proverb.
“Pleasure for one hour; a bottle of wine. Pleasure for one year; a marriage. Pleasure for a lifetime: a garden.”
How true. So get out there this year. Grow something. soniaday.com