Nursing Home Residents Take Flight With Butterfly Habitat Gardens

Butterfly habitat gardens benefit more than the pollinators they attract. Butterfly gardening when meshed with health and wellness activity programs in nursing homes augment social, physical, and psychological well-being of residents.

Accessible Garden Design

The surface area of any nursing home garden must be level, firm, well-drained and non-skid. The garden is designed for accessibility and inclusion of all residents.

Accessible garden design brings seniors close to plants and all phases of the life cycle of butterflies. Large plant containers or raised beds at lap level and reachable from a wheelchair or sitting position can easily hold both nectar and host plants.

Residents should be able to place puddling pubs and basking rocks within the containers or beds.

Vertical growing structures such as trellises, towers, and teepees put plants within easy reach while increasing the number of plants in limited space. Lattice garden walls seeded in host plants like parsley and intermingled with nectar plants allow for close up observation of eggs and larvae.

Suspended gardens like hanging baskets create personal planting spaces. Pulleys can be used to lower hanging baskets to a gardener’s working height or to adjust the height of butterfly life cycle observation cages to give seniors close encounters with pupation, adults emerging from chrysalides, drying of wings and other butterfly behaviors.

Include sun and shade zones. While butterflies and their plants require sun, senior gardeners need protection from direct sun. Broad brimmed hats, sunscreen and protective clothing should be provided to gardeners. Shelter seniors under vine covered pergolas, gazebos, umbrellas, or portable canvas tents.

As butterflies sip flower nectar using their straw-like proboscis, provide resident gardeners with straws to sip hydrating nectars including water, iced tea, lemonade, and fruit juices.

Social Butterflies

The social benefits of butterfly gardening are immediately apparent at nursing homes. Residents share prior gardening experiences in an endeavor many have engaged in much of their lives. They converse and cooperate with each other to plan, plant, and maintain the garden. A community of gardeners is formed to welcome an emerging butterfly population.

The garden enables residents to give as well as to receive, an important antidote for the loneliness and loss of control felt by elderly. Efforts of gardeners yield accomplishments they are proud to share with others.

Taking part in the care of a garden for butterflies diverts thoughts from oneself and one’s situation. Residents protect caterpillars and chrysalides while tending the plants.

Activity directors get clues to ways to extend and enrich the outdoor gardening experience from resident conversations, comments, and questions.

Physical Benefits of Butterfly Gardening

Gardening tasks encourage enjoyable forms of physical exercise needed to maintain muscle strength, balance, eye-hand coordination, flexibility and endurance.

Activity directors offer an array of gardening tasks for all levels of ability from mixing soil and fertilizer ingredients, filling planting pots with soil, transplanting, weeding, mulching, composting and deadheading to directing the water wand or spray mister.

Reduced visual acuity and manual dexterity call for accommodations. For example, seed dispensers, seed tapes, and notched seeding sticks are alternatives to sowing seeds with fingers. Ergonomic garden hand tools reduce stress on the joints for people with arthritis, rheumatism, and other hand mobility problems.

Psychological Benefits of Butterfly Gardening

Colorful flowers and butterflies bring smiles to the faces of residents. Butterfly gardening brings anticipation. The natural light is a mood booster to those who have been indoors much of the year.

Select plants that impinge on all of the senses. Include plants with bright colors, appealing fragrances, and tempting touchable textures. Grasses and reeds with leaves that rustle in the wind make natural wind chimes.

Mental alertness and concentration is maintained by performing specific short or sequential tasks. Printing plant labels and keeping a garden calendar of events or journal of happenings support cognitive skills. The numerous physical actions and sensory cues from the gardening experience stimulate memory of residents with dementia.

Plants and butterflies can be comforting companions to all humans but especially elderly separated from loved ones. The garden provides a serene and stress-free setting for reading, listening to music, napping, or visiting with family, friends, and pets.

Nursing Home Residents Take Flight

The garden inspires off-shoot activities such as rooting cuttings, pressing flowers, seed-saving, cut-flower arranging, photography, painting, seed and plant sales, hand feeding of butterflies, and even baking flower and butterfly cookies.

In the height of butterfly season bring out the butterfly nets so residents may catch, identify, and release the visitors. Conduct a butterfly census in the garden with the assistance of the nearest chapter of the North American Butterfly Association or butterfly monitoring network.

Schedule local naturalists to share their butterfly collections or slide programs with residents.

While butterfly gardens provide habitat for native and migrating butterflies, they build a community of gardeners at nursing homes.