Gardening in Retirement
Designing low maintenance gardens for retired adults doesn’t mean sacrificing beauty or enjoyment. An estimated 27 million people in the UK are involved in gardening and the activity remains a popular hobby for the British who are rightly proud of their green spaces. As a garden designer and landscape gardener, it’s not difficult to imagine why gardening is a popular pastime. We find that’s not only confined to the retired but also active and semi-retired adults and a good portion of our clients are over the age of 50. Gardening offers many physical and mental benefits including relief from stress and depression, weight loss and improved motor skills. However, the effects of aging, have an impact on gardening making it important to build a garden that is suitable to the limitations of older adults.
Ideas on Designing a Low Maintenance Garden for Retired Adults
- Choose plants that are easy to grow and tolerant of difficult conditions. Repeat flowerers such as geraniums, bearded irises, lilies and roses are wonderful for your garden. Peony leaves and flowering shrubs are also low maintenance yet brighten a garden.You might have to cut back leaves or remove deadheads after the first flush but otherwise, these plants and flowers thrive on their own without a lot of attention from you.
- Evergreens, ornamental grasses, and drought-tolerant shrubs require minimal care. Consider plants such as lavender, heather, or sedum, which need little attention but provide year-round interest.
3. Encourage Wildlife and Sustainability. A well-designed garden can also support local wildlife. Bird feeders, bee-friendly plants, and small water features attract birds and pollinators, adding vibrancy to the garden with minimal maintenance. Choosing native plants also ensures they thrive with little intervention. Some excellent native UK plants include foxglove, primrose, cowslip, bluebell, and honeysuckle, which support local wildlife and require minimal care.
In the border above are a wonderful mix of foxgloves, and cowslips with a hazel fence behind to encourage wildlife. This beautiful border is very low maintenance and perfect to attract insects.
A little paradise for senior gardeners
Even if you have a lot of time on your hands, gardening for seniors is faced by mobility challenges due to aging. Bending and squatting to weed plots are not easy tasks. Consider growing plants and flowers in pots and hanging planters.
If you are keen in making a vegetable garden, invest in a sturdy raised vegetable garden that makes it easy to tend to your plants. The added height, eliminates stooping hard. Containers and pots should also be on caster wheels so you can move them around easily.
Here are some examples of raised beds we have created in some of our gardens:
In the above example, in a newly built garden, all the borders are raised for ease of maintenance. Brick, to match the house, have been used in the far borders, and in the wooden border, next to the path, we installed some low level lights to illuminate the walkway. The low maintenance planting includes salvias, which are so easy they almost take care of themselves!
In the above example we created this brick raised bed specifically for herbs. If you like the idea of having herbs in the garden, place the bed in full sun, and as close to the kitchen as possible, so, when they are needed you can nip out to harvest easily!
We designed and built the above garden for a couple who had recently moved into a smaller property for their retirement. The raised beds are created with wooden sleepers and brick with a raised corten steel water feature for extra interest. We hope it will give you inspiration to show you the garden the previous year…it looked like this: 
Corten Steel Planters for a contemporary look
We are finding there is a growing trend for using Corten steel in the garden. The above is an example of a wonderfully informal but contemporary garden we designed and built. Here the raised beds are accessed with a crushed, local gravel pathway, an inexpensive way to create access areas.
Limited mobility and dexterity may be an issue with aging, but there are tools that can help make gardening easier despite these restrictions. When choosing tools for your garden, get those with good traction or add foam handles for better grip.
Grabbers and extension poles are other implements that you can use. Wheeled caddies are also useful to carry tools around or to move stuff from one place to another.
Full or partial retirement need not be a limitation to continue a beloved hobby or past time. By creating gardens that are suitable for older adults, there’s no reason why gardening can’t be productive, safe and fulfilling. We hope you have been inspired!
For garden maintenance services in Oxfordshire and garden clearance get in touch today.