Environmentally Friendly Landscape Design for Seniors

Environmentally Friendly Landscape Design for Seniors

Many older people enjoy gardening and get some much needed exercise as they do it. Unfortunately it often becomes impossible for them to keep on working in the garden due to failing health or just through becoming frailer. However, the right landscape design will ensure that seniors can still potter around in and enjoy their garden without the need for constant digging, weeding or heavy lifting.

Professional landscaping makes use of many different types of components to create a haven of green for anyone to enjoy. While change is never easy, allowing your garden to be changed into one that you can manage for several more years will benefit you and the environment, because many such changes are simply more environmentally friendly.

Low maintenance gardens are all the rage these days as few people have time to spend in the garden anyway. And what time they do have, they’d much prefer to spend relaxing in the garden rather than working in it. One of the major changes would be to remove annuals and replace them with perennials. Annuals are showy, but they don’t last long and require a great deal of work.

You have to replant every season and that means digging, fertilising and watering a great deal more than you like when a senior. It is not environmentally friendly, either; it’s much better to have plants that will last for several years. You can plant them out, add compost and mulch to feed them, keep the soil moist and the weeds away and that is it. Sit back and enjoy.

Choosing plants for some other aspect than a showy few weeks of flowering will stand you in good stead. Think of leaf colour and shape, berries, the subtle colour of bark on some small trees and autumn foliage and you will have a garden that always has some colour in it.

Choosing hardy species that can withstand frost, drought, heat and rain and you’ll have a garden that does not require constant renewal and all the digging that entails. Add seating under a shady tree and you’ll be able to rest without going back inside until you feel like it. Another really helpful addition to the garden for seniors is a potting bench at waist height to save you bending over.

You can do all those little jobs such as root division and potting up cuttings for friends in comfort when you don’t have to stoop to the ground. Adding height to the outside taps is also a good idea and will allow you to attach the hose without bending.

Better still, get an underground, automatic watering system installed so that you don’t have to worry about watering the garden. Professional landscapers will be able to do this for you, as well as any other jobs that are too hard.