Gardening Can Help Heal Your Heart

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Grow Your Own Get-Healthy Garden

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Use these tips to grow your own get-healthy garden:

Work with what you love. Wayne loves rocks, and he collects them as he travels for his job. He has a 2,000-pound moss rock from a trip to Oklahoma. Once, he jokes, his trunk was so full of rocks he had to decide whether to leave his suitcase or a grandchild behind. He left the rocks.

Incorporate soothing sounds. The sound of running water is a favorite for the couple, so Wayne designed the garden with several water features spaced throughout. At night he opens his bedroom window to hear the water falling over rocks. “The sound of water just puts me to sleep,” he says.

Attract nature. One of the best things about Wayne’s garden is that it attracts birds. In the mornings, cardinals and jays bathe in the stream. Woodpeckers come later to hunt for shelled peanuts that Wayne sprinkles on the ground.

Grow in weather-friendly pots. Every year, Wayne and Marla Higgins fill some 63 containers with flowers, fillers, and spillers. Since his heart attack, Wayne can’t move the pots before winter, so he has made lids for them. Each fall before adding a lid, he removes half the soil from each pot, and then piles the remaining soil in the center, away from the sides. This helps keep pots from cracking in cold weather, he says.

Surround yourself with color. Research from Kansas State University’s Department of Horticulture finds that colorful flowers work more effectively than green foliage alone to reduce tension. “Flowers are symbolically and emotionally integrated with human life,” says Eunhee Kim, the research assistant professor at Kansas State who led the studies. “Seeing them can be a powerful distraction from stressful thoughts.”