Memory Care: National Gardening Month

Gardening is potentially a “long-term” memory for residents with dementia. Many residents grew up when they had to grow their own food in order to eat. People with dementia lose their short-term memory, but seem to relate back to their long-term memories. The recollections of when they were younger, working their hands in the soil, and growing food for the family and their animals are often comforting thoughts.

It is beneficial to connect individuals living with dementia to their long-term memories. Anything we can do to reach and capture those memories is beneficial. It’s like starting a book that you know how it ends, skipping through the chapters and reading the pages that open. We work to get the residents to open their minds up to sensory sensations around them: feeling, sensation, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

This is one of my favorite poems:

Your mind is a garden

Your thoughts are the seeds

You can grow flowers

Or you can grow weeds.

Here at Hudson Grande Senior Living Hudson, OH to celebrate and participate in National Gardening month residents and staff are going to grow a garden and some new memories. We are going to learn which flowers to plant to help our local bees help us. We are considering starting a Green Thumb Club. It would be nice to take our memory care residents to one of the local sunflower fields.