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Accessible Gardening for People With Physical Disabilities: A Guide to Methods, Tools, and Plants
Provides information on developing, planting, and maintaining a garden for those with limited mobility
300 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 29, 2019
This is one of those books that look important and get recommended a lot by people who haven't read them, but end up being extremely disappointing, if not necessarily a complete waste of everyone's time.
Adil isn't disabled and doesn't work with disabled people—her only relevant qualification seems to be that she has a daughter who is in a wheelchair, and also only four or five years old at the time of writing. As a result, most of her advice isn't drawn from personal or professional experience, but from catalogues. Here is the rest of it, summed up:
1. you can garden in containers or raised beds so you don't have to stoop, and
2. remember to pay someone to put paved paths in your garden for your wheelchair.
(Hiring people to do landscaping can be expensive, but don't worry, there's also a few low-budget gems: for instance, you can line a laundry basket with a plastic sheet to create a planter box (???).)
The catalogue part of the book begins with an explanation that Adil always found it frustrating that gardening books refused to give prices or specific product names, and ends up demonstrating exactly why they don't (unless you're particularly keen to know Spear & Jackson made a 59" spade that Langenbach sold for $42 in 1993). The Tools chapter actually has a few tools that you might not be aware exist that people with certain disabilities might find useful, but there's honestly nothing you wouldn't find in an average full-sized garden centre catalogue; the other chapters remind me of browsing Victorian tool catalogues, except instead of bizarrely elaborate patented inventions it's flimsy plastic trash. The US in the early '90s was a miserable place.
The remainder of the book is very generic and mostly bad gardening advice that also leans very heavily on extremely ephemeral brand-names-pretending-to-be-cultivars that lasted only as long as the advertising cycle that created them, and is notable mainly for how much actual garbage Adil suggests you spread around you garden—buried chicken wire to keep out groundhogs, alumin(i)um pie plates hung up to scare birds, chicken wire pegged to the ground to keep out deer, plastic ``moisture crystals'' in your soil, shredded polystyrene mulch (!!!)...
If you have that much contempt for your own garden and the wider world around you, maybe just don't garden at all? She gets points for not recommending using pesticides for anything, but none of her alternatives are much better.
This could have been a very valuable book if it had been written by someone even remotely qualified to write it, but it wasn't. Adil knows as much about gardening as your average suburbanite, and somewhat less about gardening as a disabled person than any actual disabled person regardless of whether they garden or not.
Adil isn't disabled and doesn't work with disabled people—her only relevant qualification seems to be that she has a daughter who is in a wheelchair, and also only four or five years old at the time of writing. As a result, most of her advice isn't drawn from personal or professional experience, but from catalogues. Here is the rest of it, summed up:
1. you can garden in containers or raised beds so you don't have to stoop, and
2. remember to pay someone to put paved paths in your garden for your wheelchair.
(Hiring people to do landscaping can be expensive, but don't worry, there's also a few low-budget gems: for instance, you can line a laundry basket with a plastic sheet to create a planter box (???).)
The catalogue part of the book begins with an explanation that Adil always found it frustrating that gardening books refused to give prices or specific product names, and ends up demonstrating exactly why they don't (unless you're particularly keen to know Spear & Jackson made a 59" spade that Langenbach sold for $42 in 1993). The Tools chapter actually has a few tools that you might not be aware exist that people with certain disabilities might find useful, but there's honestly nothing you wouldn't find in an average full-sized garden centre catalogue; the other chapters remind me of browsing Victorian tool catalogues, except instead of bizarrely elaborate patented inventions it's flimsy plastic trash. The US in the early '90s was a miserable place.
The remainder of the book is very generic and mostly bad gardening advice that also leans very heavily on extremely ephemeral brand-names-pretending-to-be-cultivars that lasted only as long as the advertising cycle that created them, and is notable mainly for how much actual garbage Adil suggests you spread around you garden—buried chicken wire to keep out groundhogs, alumin(i)um pie plates hung up to scare birds, chicken wire pegged to the ground to keep out deer, plastic ``moisture crystals'' in your soil, shredded polystyrene mulch (!!!)...
If you have that much contempt for your own garden and the wider world around you, maybe just don't garden at all? She gets points for not recommending using pesticides for anything, but none of her alternatives are much better.
This could have been a very valuable book if it had been written by someone even remotely qualified to write it, but it wasn't. Adil knows as much about gardening as your average suburbanite, and somewhat less about gardening as a disabled person than any actual disabled person regardless of whether they garden or not.
June 26, 2025
useful, I just have bad attention span and comprehension
April 22, 2018
This taught me more about gardening-in-general than specifically gardening-as-a-disabled-person, but admittedly, I knew heck all about gardening before reading this book, and to be fair, due to the massive diversity of ability among disabled people it's probably not possible to write a comprehensive in-depth guide. It gave me a bunch of solid, basic ideas as jumping-off points to modify and work with, and it's well-written and easy to follow without being completely 101.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews