From an award-winning writer and photographer comes the perfect guide to help you evaluate your garden situation, redesign your garden, and right-size your space to make gardening easier!

In a recent survey, Forbes magazine found that 77 percent of adults over 50 prefer to age in place—as a way to preserve independence, familiarity, community, and quality of life. Many of them don’t want to leave gardens that in some cases they’ve spent a lifetime nurturing but now find daunting to maintain. As people approaching retirement age experience physical changes, they are also encountering financial and family changes, and differing priorities that can affect the amount of time and energy they allot to gardening. 

Garden for Life will help older gardeners evaluate their garden situation, suggesting ways to redesign an existing garden or to design a new one when downsizing (or “right-sizing”), new techniques and tools to make gardening easier, how to select appropriate plants, and also how and when to ask for help to lighten the load—so that they can focus on the life-enhancing aspects of gardening. 

Hayes has long written about the how-to of gardening and is also keenly aware of the why. Gardening is a simple way to answer the human need to connect with nature; that craving, called biophilia is so powerful that doctors in many cases have started prescribing time in nature over drugs. Gardening offers a low-intensity workout with a variety of natural movements. Time spent tending plants can produce a meditative state that decreases stress while giving the gardener a sense of purpose. Growing your own food is a recipe for improved nutrition and better brain health. Gardening grows social connection and community. In short, gardening is excellent for health and longevity. 

Nowadays older gardeners are leading efforts on garden-related environmental action, food access, habitat creation, and community involvement. Many see gardening as their legacy. The book will feature five to seven short profiles of inspiring older gardeners and their gardens. In addition, there will be a section featuring some of the simple “garden-adjacent” exercises shared by the author’s trainer (a certified senior fitness expert and Master Gardener) that mimic movements in the garden, helpful for warming up before gardening and for downtime in winter. 

The book will conclude with an appeal to honor and celebrate older gardeners and their collective wisdom, along with a call to action, highlighting the many ways that older gardeners can grow new gardeners.

About The Author

Rhonda Fleming Hayes is the author of Pollinator Friendly Gardening: Gardening for Bees, Butterflies, and Other Pollinators and an award- winning writer and photographer applying her passion to all things plant-related. Combining  a lifetime of gardening experience with wit and solid research-based advice, her stories can be found in the Minnesota Star Tribune, Northern Gardener, and Mpls/StPaul Magazine. She has also been published in Southern Living, Midwest Living, Savannah Magazine, and numerous online sites. She’s a popular speaker for garden clubs and other groups with presentations covering pollinators, butterfly gardening, native plants, and the art of kitchen gardening, to name a few. Rhonda is a native Californian with Southern roots living in Minnesota. Nowadays she and her husband spend winters in New Orleans, where she delights in growing her own lemons. She has also lived and gardened in Tennessee, Kansas (twice), Illinois (twice), Iowa, and even England. Regardless of location, she has learned to bloom where she’s planted.  

Rhonda gardens in Minneapolis in an urban neighborhood surrounded by woods and water. The abundant plot is home to many bees, butterflies, birds, and beneficial insects. She loves to share the fruits (and veggies) of her garden with friends, family, and wildlife. She has volunteered as an Extension Master Gardener since 2000. She is a member of GardenComm, the Minnesota State Horticultural Society, the Herb Society of America, and is a past trustee of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.