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Volunteers to the rescueFeatured in I Love Creston Magazine - Apr, 2012 Brian Bell
Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” wrote 18th century English poet Alexander Pope. So, too, is hope spawned by spring itself, the season of rebirth.
A sense of optimism unique to this special time of year will be renewed this month, courtesy of the Creston Valley Garden Club, in a setting sorely in need of every uplifting influence it can get. Club members will be marching on Swan Valley Lodge for a third straight year armed with spades, shears and sprinklers, not to mention wheelbarrows full of goodwill to share among residents, their relatives and the staff who also benefit from the gardeners’ benevolent efforts.
Louise Moberg, the co-ordinator of recreation, day programming and volunteer services at the extended-care home, first fielded a call from the club in 2010.
“They wanted to know if they could come out and clean up our grounds because they saw that they needed some help,” Moberg says. “Lots of the shrubs and stuff needed trimming so they all came in on a weekend and did a complete cleanup.
“It was awesome. We don’t have a gardening maintenance program here. We were trying to do it ourselves after hours and on our lunch breaks.”
Club members kept coming back and eventually “decided they were going to take us on as their pet project.”
Fittingly, the gardeners’ first appearance of the year coincides with National Volunteer Week, which runs April 15-21 in recognition of Canada’s 12.5 million volunteers, a small portion of whom help make the Creston Valley the beloved place that it is.
The contributions are clearly not lost on the 100-plus lodge residents and their caregivers.
“They really appreciate them,” Moberg says. “They think it’s wonderful that they take their own time to come and do that for them. It makes them feel blessed and honoured to have somebody care that they get to look at nice things too, because they can’t do it on their own.
“The residents that we have are basically . . . here for the last six months of life. We don’t have a lot of people who can just go out and water or weed.”
Though physically unable to help, some share the moment in their wheelchairs by simply observing or spinning tales of their own green-thumb pasts.
“A lot of our residents have been gardeners during their lives and so they appreciate the gardens,” Moberg says. “They love to see the flowers. Last year we started a vegetable garden as well, so we have nice, fresh tomatoes and peppers and carrots. As soon as there was a ripe tomato, it was gone.
“All of our staff think it’s wonderful (too). It makes the morale better . . . seeing new flowers blooming or seeing that there’s not a bunch of weeds.”
Nielle Baugh is a regular Swan Valley visitor among the 10 or 12 different club members who take part in work bees that run weekly early in the growing season and taper off to every second week in the heat of the summer, culminating with a major cleanup after the first frost.
“I think all of us are doing it because we like to volunteer in the community and it’s nice to do it through your particular interest,” says Baugh, a retiree who joined the garden club shortly after moving from Battleford, Sask., in 2010. “I enjoy working with a group of people who are involved in a project of some kind and this seems to be a very rewarding one.”
Club membership is 50-strong. Guest speakers expound on pertinent topics during monthly meetings, and the club also organizes a biennial tour of selected private gardens in the valley.
“Some people work at the greenhouse at the college,” Baugh says. “Some people just work in their own yards, and there is a group that works at Swan Valley as soon as the weather improves.”
They are buoyed by the positive feedback, though not dependent on it.
“I don’t think that any of us are doing it for that reason, to be thanked,” Baugh says. “But it’s nice to see the difference we make. The staff are very appreciative and I think that the residents (are), as well. They say that it’s made a huge difference and that the grounds are very pleasant now. I think they had been badly neglected for awhile.”
Only one of four garden areas is visible from the street. Another one separates two new wings erected in 2005 to the west of the main structure; it was known as the “dandelion garden” before being planted in 2007, but even that represented only a modest improvement.
“These shrubs were planted when they first did the gardens and the trees and we found that a lot of them are inappropriate because they’ve just overgrown and people can’t see out their windows anymore,” Moberg says. “We’re trying to change some of that because everything had just gotten unruly. They did a lot of trimming and a lot of cleaning up and brought in bark chips.”
The hard, clay soil had to be rehabilitated with bags of peat moss to make it workable.
Another club member,
Harvey Reese, went so far with the beautification project as to paint wooden planters, benches and trellises in the garden, which surrounds a summertime fountain. The former dandelion patch is now known as Olga’s Tranquility Garden in memory of a Cranbrook woman, Olga Kramer, in whose name the East Kootenay Foundation for Health contributes an annual sum of money used to buy gardening supplies.
A larger common area behind the main building features space for barbecuing, a wheelchair-accessible swing and a massive rock unearthed during a Swan Valley expansion in 1995.
“They trim up all the trees and look after the roses,” Moberg says. “They put some grasses in these planters because it gets a lot of sun out here and they realize that we can’t put a lot of plants out here because they need a lot of water.”
Grounds to the east of the lodge feature large planter boxes that may give way to shade trees this year.
It all adds up to a lot of work but it’s a labour of love for the club members, who have the expertise and tools to take care of business.
“Whatever’s required,” Baugh says. “Sometimes it’s raking. Sometimes it’s pruning, planting, watering. We’re all experienced gardeners so when we arrive we look around and see what needs to be done.”
They spend two hours tops at any given time, including a break for refreshments that allows for social interaction among themselves and with residents. But 10 people going at it for even just one hour represents 10 hours of work.
“We get a lot done in the time that we’re there,” Baugh says.
Club input actually begins before the digging starts as part of a program in which Moberg and
half-a-dozen residents make
weekly trips to the College of the Rockies Community Greenhouse. Club members recommend what plants would be suitable for the Swan Valley grounds, and those are the seeds Moberg and company plant and tend in the greenhouse until they are ready for transplanting.
This year the club is installing an automatic drip irrigation system in Olga’s Garden, with plans to phase in more of the same in subsequent years. Until then, Reese is the man with the watering can.
“His wife lives in Swan Valley Lodge and he visits her every day so he waters for us,” Moberg says. “It’s nice that we can rely on Harvey.”
Reese’s dedication may be extreme because of his personal ties to Swan Valley but he’s not alone when it comes to boosting morale there.
“One individual who recently moved here from Calgary comes in four times a week and helps with our bingo program,” Moberg says, referring to Leslie Kelner, a semi-retired accountant. “She’ll help with our Happy Hour program, our birthday tea and other special functions like that.
“As well, she is willing to go on one-on-one walks with some of the residents that just want to get outside and go for a 20-minute walk. I would say she probably puts in 10 hours a week.
“She also volunteers at Gleaners and the library – pretty busy lady.”
Then there’s a woman who plays piano for a Monday morning singalong, a dozen musical groups and individuals who entertain during the Friday Happy Hour program and a handful of church groups which take turns leading non-denominational Sunday services.
“Pastor Ron Benty (of Wynndel Community Church) comes in every three months and does an in-house memorial service for us,” Moberg adds. “He volunteers his time to do that, which is nice because a lot of them can’t get out to the funerals.”
All in all, volunteers enrich the lives of Swan Valley residents immeasurably, an outreach that is recognized through annual volunteer appreciation luncheons.
“So much would be missed if we didn’t have our volunteers, because we just don’t have the staff to do it,” says Moberg, a Swan Valley employee since 1995. “It would be pretty boring for them here. Recreation tries to do what they can throughout the day but we’ve had quite a few cutbacks within Interior Health. On the weekends we don’t have as many staff working anymore and when the volunteers come in it really helps.”
The only requirements are a free criminal record check through the RCMP and an application/interview process through Interior Health. Moberg has a couple of specific roles on her wish list.
“I would definitely like to get a volunteer who would come in and do shopping for our residents once a week,” she says. “Another program I’d like to start with volunteers would be writing letters, Christmas cards. We have a really nice oak desk here and it would be nice to have a volunteer come in, even if it was in the evening, (to help) anybody who would like to write a card or a letter, because a lot of people don’t have use of their hands anymore.”
Of course, there will always be opportunities to simply get residents outside for some fresh air, a walk around the block or window shopping downtown.
The rewards, though intangible, are well worth the effort, as far as Baugh is concerned.
“All volunteers, I think, volunteer for the same reason,” she says, summing up the volunteer spirit. “Everybody realizes that if a community is going to be a community, everybody better join in and do something, and for us gardeners to be able to volunteer (by) gardening is particularly pleasant.”
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