Gardening. Age. Hands

Woodstock Garden Club/Norman Williams Public Library Webinar

Stock photos may be ageist. And wrong. Two things hit my screen more or less simultaneously, one about age and hands and a second about gardening. The first is Jeannette Leardi’s article in Next Avenue about how older people (I am one) are portrayed in the media, specifically in the vast stores of stock photos, like ones that sometimes appear at the top of this page and often in advertising. Based on her research, the portrayal is pretty unimaginative. “ . . . [I]t appears that the only acceptable stock-photo activities for anyone 50 and older (who is not a white male) are talking with doctors and nurses, walking in a park or sitting around a table with friends or family.”

But worse is the reduction of older people through images of hands only: wrinkled, dry, and age-spotted. The author allows that old hands are real, and the use may be fair. But she is concerned about what the hands are doing in the images. It seems a short and monotonous list: resting on the handle of a cane (very popular), resting on a hospital bed, or gripping another, usually a family member’s, hand. Moreover:

In the case of older adults, it's not so much what the hands are doing but rather what they are not doing: using a laptop or smartphone, playing an instrument and yes, even hammering a nail, holding onto a steering wheel, writing on a black/white board or operating a microscope. [Comment: To be fair, my own search did find a steering wheel photo and one or two of old hands holding playing cards. Youthful hands seem to be all about the cellphones.]

Which brings me to my second item. The Norman Williams Public Library and the Woodstock Garden Club are presenting an online webinar called Aging Gardens, Aging Gardeners by Master Gardener Ann McEntee on February 22 at 4 pm. As we look ahead to spring, what could be better and more appropriate for the Upper Valley than a tutorial on how to renew your aged garden even as you yourself are aging?

Do you look forward to spring for the beauty that your gardens produce? Do you love your gardens but not the seemingly endless hours of maintenance that they demand? Have you ever found yourself resenting your gardens because their care prevents you from pursuing other interests? And finally, have you come to the painful realization that you and your gardens have aged and changed over time?

“Aging Gardens, Aging Gardeners” responds to these questions. It is intended to help all of us come to terms with our aging, but very much beloved gardens. Ann presents strategies for gardening more wisely: taking care of ourselves as we garden; assessing our home landscapes; prioritizing gardening tasks; managing mature plants; and creating smaller, simpler gardens. 

(For more information and to sign up for the free webinar (open to all), click here.)

Reading these two together, I thought of all of the older, busy hands that might indeed rest on canes, but also thumb through seed catalogs, edit garden schematics on graph paper or on the back of an old grocery list, scrub out a dirty pail and the garden tools resting therein. I saw hands potting and repotting, handling a shovel and a dibble, shaking bags of soil into raised beds, scattering mulch. Plucking a home-grown tomato. Because that is really what aging hands are up to. And more.

What have your hands done today? Mine worked unsuccessfully on a puzzle, forked some pasta into my mouth at lunch, waved at a friend, loaded and unloaded a grocery cart, put away the groceries, folded at least two fitted sheets, snapped some asparagus stalks for dinner (in truth, my husband is more the gardener; I am more the cook), framed a photo. Finally, both hands hovered over my keyboard as one hand paused to push my glasses up the bridge of my nose. One finger will soon hit “Send.” The hands will then move on to the kitchen to sift, pour and stir en route to a homemade batch of banana-blueberry muffins. And there you have it—a fraction of what just two aging hands have done and can do in an afternoon. Imagine multitudes.

(Photo, top, and quoted text courtesy of Norman Williams Public Library. Painting, above courtesy of Wikimedia, public domain, Hubert von Herkomer, The Old Gardener. Isn’t it a beauty?)
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.