Cora Keber, director of education of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, was motivated to start a program dedicated to those affected by dementia after watching her mom participating in activities with her grandmother at a care facility such as gardening and going on walks. Jenny Sanders, director of the State Botanical Garden, was inspired after her visit to Naples Botanic Garden Meet Me in the Garden in 2018.
Through this, they created the Meet Me at the Garden program, hosted in the Porcelain and Decorative Arts Museum at the botanical gardens. On July 11, Keber and Sanders hosted their first meeting.
At the meeting, Keber spoke about the partnership with the Cognitive Aging Research and Education (CARE) Center to make a curriculum for the Meet Me at the Garden program. Keber and Sanders connected with the CARE Center to create a program and curriculum of sensory activities, interactive education and horticulture activities for people with dementia.
The structure of the program includes a history of a topic, meet and greet, identification of plants, sensory walk and hands-on activities. The planning for the curriculum started in 2022 and it officially launched in 2023.
The goal of the program is to create a feeling of excitement, curiosity and education about everyday familiar items. Keber explained the history and benefits of coffee, tea, chocolate, leafy greens and gourds to participants of the program. The participants engaged in hands-on activities such as making their own chamomile tea bags, taste testing different types of chocolate and matching pictures of vegetables to the correct categories of gourds, pumpkins and squash. The participants went on a sensory walk of different types of plants and leafy greens to touch, identify what they are and learn about their pollinators.
“This program really is thinking about like, how are we connecting people to people and people to nature and people to plants,” Keber said.
Over 130,000 Georgians are estimated to have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. The CARE Center engages in research to better understand and prevent this. They also provide education on dementia risk reduction, and provide planning and support for people with dementia and their care partners. Lydia Burton, special events coordinator for CARE and director of Meet Me at the Garden, started the capstone project in January 2023 which included the program curriculum. She has learned the importance of horticulture therapy from the project.
“Horticultural therapy is great, especially for care partners, it brings this stability and this calm and this joy,” Burton said. “I remember when we got our feedback, we did qualitative feedback, where everyone wrote what they thought of the program, and we put it through a word cloud generator, and the most said word was perfect.”
Engaging in sensory and educational activities, such as horticulture, is good for the brain. It improves sleep, decreases dementia related behaviors and maintains attention and engagement longer than traditional activities. Horticultural therapy can be modified so that it is appropriate and accessible to everyone. Family members or spouses who want to create an indoor gardening experience for a person with dementia should do their research beforehand.
“So you have to do a little research, okay, make sure that whatever you’re growing, it’s not going to pose a health risk,” Sheri Dorn, an assistant professor in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Georgia, said. “A lot of indoor plants exude a latex-like substance as a part of their plant fluids, and that can be pretty irritating to some people.”
The future goal of the program would be for extension offices or their coordinators to run the program across the state of Georgia. People who want to experience what the program has to offer could sign up through those offices.
“Determining the best way to serve the participants in a way that feels safe and comfortable and joyful to them, is how I would like to change it,” Keber said.
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