After hearing story after story about the therapeutic and life-changing effects of gardening on the mentally challenged, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern.  It’s more like the pattern noticed me, and asked me to write about it.

On a recent broadcast of This American Life, Veronica Chater tells the story of her developmentally disabled brother Vincent, who after 12 years of working the same job, decided to quit, and suddenly, alarmingly, quit everything else.  To the great concern of his family, he took to sleeping up to 18 hours a day.  Finally, his family came up with a suggestion that Vinnie agreed to: chicken farming.  Chater details Vinnie’s reaction to the newly constructed chicken farm:

Vinnie took to every aspect of chicken farming.  He was painstakingly mindful of the chicken’s daily schedule of free range feeding and lockup.  And he was especially fastidious about coop hygiene.  But more than that, to everyone’s surprise, he started participating in activities again.  He started basketball practice, and he’s training again for the Special Olympics.

Pretty much at anytime of the day, you can see that he’s standing as still as a marble sculpture in the backyard beside the coop.  His eyes half closed, and his palms cupping the breeze, thinking, or just listening to the sounds of his hens.  He named them after old friends, and talks to them like children.

Other anecdotal evidence supports the notion that agricultural activities have a therapeutic effect on the mentally disabled.  A friend of mine is a guidance counselor for at risk youth.  Once we were talking about the kids that she works with, and she began to tell me the story of a young man who had especially aroused her sympathy and concern.

The young man in question was mentally challenged, some might say retarded.  He grew up in a broken family, and his parents gave him very little of the love and attention that all children require.   As he grew up in a poverty-stricken community, he became a large and imposing young man, and as is often the case, he fell in with the wrong crowd.  Because of his large physique and his slow mind, local thugs used him to deliver drugs and for other risky criminal errands.

The young woman who was his guidance counselor saw in him a gentle and misguided soul, analogous to Steinbeck’s Lennie, and she wracked her brain to try and help him find a way out of his path of destruction.  He had no interest in school, couldn’t even understand what school was for or why he should be interested in attending.

Then, perhaps by chance, he discovered gardening.  He was given tools, seeds, water, and a small plot of land to work.  He took to it with a level of interest and dedication that was shocking to his counselor.  It turns out, that this young man absolutely loved to work with seeds and plants, even though he had little exposure to it during his childhood.  He demonstrated an exceptional level of understanding and ability when it came to working soils and tending seedlings.

Her discovery of his salvation may have come too late.  Around this same time, a local thug, for whatever past vendetta or grudge, came at him with a knife at a gas station.  The young man, physically powerful as he was, reacted with all instinct and no thought, turning the wrist of his attacker, and plunging the knife into his gut.  The attacker died shortly thereafter.  The whole incident was caught on the gas station’s security cameras, and now the young man is facing criminal charges in a court of law.

In Bolivia, I knew a young mentally disabled man from a rural farming family who had found his niche in life with little trouble.  Everybody in the village knew he was mentally disabled, but he was generally accepted as such, and nobody seemed to give him too much trouble over it.  And he was, at heart, a sheep herder.  He loved to take care of his sheep, and he would herd them from here to there joyfully and with earnest attention to detail.  When one of his sheep went missing, he would worry endlessly until he found it.  For him, the job was both a joy and a challenge, and he performed it ably and with enthusiasm.

Though all of the evidence presented in the post is purely anecdotal, I feel it is compelling enough to warrant further, more serious research.  A wealth of data sources already exists.  A great place to start would be Red Wiggler Farms, a CSA in Montgomery County Maryland dedicated to providing meaningful employment for adults with disabilities.  Fountain House is also an organization that provides access to a large garden area for its occupationally engaged disabled adults.

Psychologists and sociologists, slow as they are to pick up on innovative trends in the field, have yet to touch this issue with the tools of their trade.  I am quite certain if they did, they could develop a compelling body of research with the potential to influence policy initiatives and community development programs around the country, in the process revolutionizing our concept of “meaningful employment” for the disabled and creating therapy programs for at-risk disabled youth long before they are indicted for murder charges.