According to Bigger Garden, 55% of U.S. households have a garden. Many people love Mediterranean gardens for their low water requirements and micro-homesteading where they can grow healthy foods and herbs.

You and your grandmother may have enjoyed gardening when you were younger. However, there’s no reason for her to stop now that she’s older.

Gardening for seniors is a good way for individuals to entertain themselves, and it’s great for their health.

The health benefits of gardening include improved mood and stress management. Gardening also helps with mobility. Keep reading if you’d like to know more about this therapeutic activity for seniors and its benefits.

What Are Therapeutic Activities?

Therapeutic activities are tasks and hobbies that help improve someone’s ability to do daily activities and their mental health. These activities can help improve strength limitations and balance issues.

Therapeutic activities may help older adults develop endurance and learn compensatory strategies. A compensatory strategy is a behavioral or environmental change to help compensate for a weakness or deficit.

These changes enable people to handle challenges or tasks more efficiently. Therapeutic activities can ease mental health issues like stress and anxiety. Some activities can even improve cognition.

Other therapeutic activities for seniors (gardening aside) include:

Music therapy
Art therapy
Puzzles and written activities
Pet therapy
Aromatherapy and meditation

The Benefits of Gardening for Seniors

Older adults lose muscle strength as they get older thanks to a condition called sarcopenia. The technical definition of sarcopenia is the gradual loss of muscle mass, function, and strength.

However, you could sum it up as when a person’s muscles weaken. Sarcopenia is often associated with old age, but a much younger person can have the diagnosis.

It’s possible to reverse sarcopenia with lifestyle changes like diet and exercise. One of the health benefits of gardening is increased mobility.

Older adults can engage underused muscles and can rebuild lost strength. As such, gardening is also therapeutic for seniors who’ve suffered strokes.

Stress Management

Did you know that 20 to 30 minutes of outdoor time can greatly reduce stress? It lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, and boosts endorphin levels and dopamine, which promote happiness.

Seeking senior wellness through nature is a good way to improve mood. Gardening can lower anxiety and depression, both of which can come from prolonged levels of stress.

Increases Vitamin D Levels

Your grandmother may not have a vitamin D deficiency due to her love of gardening, but it’s common for many other seniors to develop one. Many older adults don’t get much sun exposure.

Seniors also experience declining renal function. This can make it harder to convert vitamin D into its more active form, 1,25-dihydroxy vitamin D (calcitriol), and this is detrimental to bone and immune health.

Something as simple as diet can impact vitamin D levels. However, gardening can help normalize vitamin D levels via time spent in the sun.

Improves Mental Cognition and Social Skills

Planning a garden isn’t easy. There’s a lot of logistics and memorization involved. For example, you’ve got to plan which plants need direct sunlight and which have different blooming schedules.

Planting and supporting a garden keeps the brain active and engaged. The task helps maintain various cognitive functions through repeated action.

Sensory stimulation — like the feel and smell of dirt and plants — can improve focus and concentration. Other benefits of sensory stimulation include:

Triggering positive memories in gardeners
Helping people learn to communicate through all their senses

Speaking of communicating, gardening for seniors can improve social skills by building a sense of belonging and community among their peers. It revitalizes accountability through increased cognitive function.

Gardeners learn empathy through their accountability for the plants. It’s not uncommon for people with dementia to lose the ability to empathize.

Those with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are prone to losing empathy. It’s one of the core symptoms of bvFTD.

Boosts Immune Health

We’ve mentioned immune health while discussing vitamin D earlier. However, we haven’t discussed how the “sunshine vitamin” aids your immune system.

Vitamin D absorbs calcium and phosphorus, encouraging healthy cell growth and increasing resistance to illness. Interestingly, vitamin D lowers the chances of catching the flu and wards off depression.

Gardening for elderly wellness could mitigate complications from asthma and psoriasis via exposure to Mycobacterium vaccae — a bacteria commonly found in gardening soil.

Studies in mice have shown the bacteria may contain properties that reduce inflammation and hypersensitivity associated with asthma. Studies indicate it could improve psoriasis too.

Gives Older Adults Self Confidence

Therapeutic activities for seniors, like gardening, can help bolster self-confidence. You may have felt pride when you got your first blooms, and seniors may feel similarly.

Older adults like having created something new. It’s common to feel a sense of nurturing as you’re helping something to grow and thrive. Gardening can make seniors feel more connected with the world.

Many people enjoy learning new skills alongside their new hobbies. Some of these skills include:

Planning: learn what and how to plant and the garden layout
Soil analysis: learn about your soil and what it takes to grow plants in it
Pruning: this is something that takes dedication and practice to learn
Pest control: learn how to identify/remove pests and what insects can help your garden
Patience: gardening takes time, which means waiting for gratification

These learned emotions and skills show how deeply connected gardening and mental health are. Gardening can make people more well-rounded.

Achieving Senior Wellness Through Nature

Gardening is fantastic for elderly wellness, as it helps with physical and mental health issues. Gardening for seniors can boost your immune system, increase mental cognition, and improve self-confidence.

Of course, gardening isn’t the only way to ensure senior wellness. Morada Lake Hefner provides a safe environment that accommodates seniors’ independence in Oklahoma City, OK. We have individual care plans for each resident, and our community is pet-friendly with amenities like housekeeping and medication management.

Ask about our military veterans program if you’re looking for financial aid. Contact us with questions or to schedule a tour.