Three years ago, when Heather Craig’s husband had Alzheimer’s disease and was confined to a wheelchair, she wanted to bring him into the Northampton Community Gardens, where she had a plot. She knew that he would enjoy the sights, sounds and smells. But there was no way to bring his wheelchair into the gardens, and she started thinking about creating a wheelchair path there.
Although Craig’s husband has passed away, she has continued to forge ahead with the project and has almost finished building a prototype path. She wants to promote accessibility for everyone, but she also has a more personal stake in the project: a physical condition that will likely put her in a wheelchair in the future. And, she does not want to give up gardening.
When Craig first began investigating how such a path might be created, she discovered that the only stable surface for wheelchairs is poured concrete or asphalt. Unfortunately, both of these contain harmful chemicals that leach into garden soil. But she didn’t give up. “I was lying around one day not being able to move because of my disability,” Craig said. “I was thinking about what kind of path would work, how could we solve this, what are all the aspects of this, what would it be like if …”
The design process is “like being an artist,” Craig said. “I play with it till I get what I want. I wanted something that could be easily made but that could also be torn out, if necessary. I figure out what is optimal, and then what an average person could actually create.” Since she began the project, she’s become a self-taught expert in adaptive design. “It’s a mental Rubik’s Cube,” she said. “That’s what I like about this. I’ve made all sort of mistakes so I can tell other people how to do this the right way.”
Craig began to experiment with alternative materials that would provide the necessary strength and stability. With no budget to speak of, she has been limited to materials she can get at no cost. Her design uses wooden pallets filled with woodchips and masonry sand and topped with cement pavers. She has tested pallets of varying strengths. “Some pallets are rated to hold 250 pounds,” she explained. “Those work for lighter things like cartons of cereal boxes. Then there are 850-pound pallets that are strong enough to support refrigerators.” She started by using the 850-pound pallets but later determined that lighter, mid-range pallets work just as well.
It took Craig two and a half years to collect the materials for the project. “This is cobbled together out of donations of different things,” she said. She got a block of yellow pavers from a couple who were replacing their patio. She also finds materials on Facebook Marketplace.
Her final plan is for a rectangular path around a garden plot with a wider space where wheelchairs can turn around. She said her design takes into consideration that there are many kinds of wheelchairs. “The chairs that people really live in are much bigger than the transport chairs you might use in the hospital if you have a broken leg,” Craig said. “To get a bigger chair around a corner, the foot boxes might hit a plant on the outer edge. So I want to put lemon balm or sage, something that would smell pretty cool and be durable. Or cosmos, zinnias or tall marigolds that won’t all die if you knock one down.” She smiled, adding, “not an orchid, not a strawberry plant, not lettuce.”
Craig said she wants to make it possible for people in wheelchairs to work in the Community Gardens. “People think that if you’re in a wheelchair, you can only garden in a nursing home,” she said. “But that’s not so.” Ideally, Craig said she would install raised beds at two different levels, 24 and 30 inches, to accommodate gardeners of all ages and sizes. “I will put a bed on each inside curve,” she said. “If someday I’m in a wheelchair, that’s going to work really well for me.”
Most people using wheelchairs or other mobility devices such as walkers or tap sticks tend to be accompanied by people who can help them out, Craig said. “There might be some things out of reach that I would need a friend to help me with, but things I want to be able to put my hands on, like Swiss chard and annual flowers, I’d still be able to do myself.”
Craig also wants to make the gardens accessible to people with sensory impairments. “Imagine if you’re blind,” she said. “You can still enjoy hearing the birds.” She plans to include plants that offer all sorts of sensory experiences, such as plants with different smells and textures.
For her next project, Craig hopes to create a wheelchair-accessible path at the organic community garden maintained by Grow Food Northampton. “They have a plot with water close by that’s right near the road,” she said. “So PVTA could actually drop a person off there.” As a nonprofit organization, Grow Food Northampton is eligible to apply for a grant from Home Depot that would provide up to $5,000 worth of materials for the path. “They have a lot more manpower than I do,” she said. “I’m excited about the possibility of recreating what I’ve done here with standardized, really good materials in a really good setting. It’s like making a wedding dress. This is the muslin version of the dress that any good seamstress will make before cutting the expensive fabric.”
In the future, she plans to incorporate adaptive design features for people with a variety of health issues. “I want to provide for as many possibilities as I can,” she said. She has learned, for example, that black entryway rugs keep people with dementia from going past them, because they appear to be holes. “So if I put row of black pavers on the edges, that makes it easier for a person with mild dementia to stay on the path,” she said. “And checkerboard patterns are helpful for people with Parkinson’s disease.”
It hasn’t always been easy for Craig to deal with passersby in the gardens. “People used to always make comments about my junk,” she said. “I’ve been telling them for three years that this is a wheelchair path. A wheelchair path. Now that they can finally see it, they finally get it. People went from saying, ‘what the is that?’ to ‘oh my god, how cool. What a great idea.’”
Craig said she tells these people that she’s going to need a wheelchair path in a couple of years. “When they hear this, their perception changes, because they haven’t really thought about it before,” she said. “I love it. What will happen when they see people in different types of chairs or with different types of mobility devices, like walkers or tap sticks? All of a sudden, they’ll be thinking—oh, where else could they go in this garden? And then they’ll potentially engage with the person.”
As she surveyed her work-in-progress, she exclaimed, “I was so excited to find out it actually is possible. And that’s a really beautiful thing because it becomes something that I can offer back.”
Mickey Rathbun, an Amherst-based lawyer turned journalist, has written the Get Growing column since 2016.