“Rose.”
It was barely a whisper. More like a gentle breeze stirring the spirea on a summer afternoon. The nearby caregiver looked up, surprised. Tears edged the corners of her eyes as she watched the older woman timidly touch the rose’s velvety petal. It was the first time she’d heard the woman speak; the first time she saw a light of recognition in eyes otherwise dulled by Alzheimer’s.
“It is her name,” the caregiver murmured to the other woman at the table, a member of the Petal Pusher’s Garden Club in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Rose is her name.”
When I met the Petal Pushers in 2022, members had been gathering at a local memory care facility on the first Monday of the month for over two years. Cutting blossoms and boughs from their own gardens, adding castoff flowers from local grocery stores, hauling vases collected from rummage sales, the garden club members helped residents create flower arrangements for their rooms.
Rose was one of many lives touched by their kindness, laughter, and flowers.
The Petal Pushers, like the garden club members with whom I have spoken from South Haven, Portage, Thornapple, Three Rivers, Carnegie, Saugatuck, and Holland, have found ways to make nature’s array of colors, smells, and textures accessible to people in our city parks, on our streets, and in our neighborhoods. Several clubs, like the Petal Pushers, have discovered ways to reach those who are confined because of age, illness, or disability.
Michigan communities reap the benefits.
As a result, the first bench to be funded by the Bench and a Tree initiative at the Rosy Mound Expansion will boast a plaque commemorating Michigan Garden Clubs. Their enthusiastic support was the catalyst behind the Bench and a Tree, an initiative to make nature more accessible in our community parks.
As you walk the paved 8’-wide senior-friendly path and up the slight incline to the Lake Michigan overlook at Rosy Mound Expansion, you may notice the golden clusters of the hoary puccoon, daisy-like faces of the fleabane, spotted petals of the horsemint, dazzling sparkles of the sand cherry, veined purple petals of the beach pea, or—if you are lucky—the pink kiss of a bloom surrounded by the thorns of the endangered pitcher’s thistle.
Nature plants its own gardens—even in the windswept sands of Michigan’s dunes. With the financial support of the Bench and a Tree fund and the fund-raising efforts of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Trees Initiative, this dune garden and that at Ottawa Sands, will be accessible to everyone. Including seniors.
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