When Carol and Doug Stephens’ 17-year-old son, Scott, survived a car accident that left him severely disabled, they faced an issue familiar to many families affected by life-altering brain trauma: long-term care.
Options are limited — even more so for residential programs that offer some independence without a restrictive environment. Carol and Doug wanted a better quality of life for their son, so they decided to step up and create their own.
Supportive Living is a nonprofit organization that offers independence and a chance for rehabilitation. The Rockport Residential Program offers therapeutic programs for residents that help improve motor and cognitive abilities and neuroplasticity, one of which is a horticultural therapy program in which brain injury survivors plant, nurture and create beautiful flower arrangements.
This week on the Joy Beat, we’re honoring Leslie Doig, horticulture manager of Supportive Living’s FlowerBuds program. Leslie joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share the joy her program brings to both the residents and to the Rockport community. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: Before we get into FlowerBuds in detail, there are some details I left out. Talk about the program’s main element: the anonymous bouquets.
Leslie Doig: The FlowerBuds program was developed to spread joy using flowers. Recipients sometimes don’t know who the flowers came from. But the intention is to tell them that they have a buddy, and we’re telling them that through flower delivery, so we’re spreading joy with flowers.
Rath: Tell us a bit more background [about] Supportive Living and how FlowerBuds found a home.
Doig: Well, the way I got involved with it was I was working with Supportive Living in their Lexington office, volunteering, and one of the residents there said that he really missed growing tomatoes, which he was able to do before his injury. Would I help him get a pot and dirt and tomato plants and help him to water [the plant]?
So I did that, and he was so excited to eat his own homegrown tomatoes again after so many years of not being able to. The other residents in that facility in Lexington saw what joy this was bringing him and thought that they would love to have a garden, too, and grow some of their own food. So, we expanded.
We developed a program of horticulture, and we used all sorts of things in nature — the wind, or we paint rocks sometimes, create bird feeders — that all falls under horticulture. The residents there liked it so much that the program was then expanded to other facilities owned by Supportive Living, and we also invited people from the community to come in and attend the classes.
It’s grown from one tomato plant to several gardens and flowers being spread through the community.
Rath: Can you explain a bit more about how this works as therapy? I feel like this is not the first time I’ve heard of a flower arrangement being used for people getting over brain trauma.
Doig: Right. Well, horticulture therapy covers a lot of types of activities that involve any kind of nature — [it] might be flowers, might be trees, you’ve heard of forest bathing — and there’s something innate in each of us that feels really connected to the environment.
When you get out in the woods, when you get outside, you feel like …you feel well. It’s a wellness type of activity, and you can forget some of your daily frustrations because you’re in the presence of beauty, which is all the colorful flowers and nice scents, and maybe hearing the birds. So those things all have scientific data that proves that they help individuals with their wellness and well-being.
We’re spreading it out to other people in the community, not just the residents here at Supportive Living. We’re giving it to anyone in the community who might need a little pick-me-up. Individuals contact me through our website, and they say, “Could you deliver a little posy to my grandmother? She’s not feeling well today.”
So we’ll go to the grandmother with a beautiful flower arrangement and give it to her, but it doesn’t always say who the flowers are from. So the recipients have fun, I think, talking to me about who gave it to them. I can’t tell [who sent the flowers], but I can give them some hints, and if they come up with it, that’s fine too. It makes them laugh a little bit.
The interaction is just as important as receiving the flowers. But the flowers stay in their house, and they can think about the joy that they brought for a couple of days.
Rath: Talk a bit more about that because you talked about how wonderful this is for the people working on the flowers. What’s the return been like out into the community?
Doig: Well, the individuals who are creating the flowers get a lot out of doing that because, in their lives, they don’t have a lot of opportunities to be productive or contribute. They really feel like they’re part of a community when they’re building a little flower arrangement or watering the flower that will become an arrangement. It gives them a sense of purpose.
The benefit to the recipients has been overwhelming. I’ve received so many nice thank you notes, and photos of the flowers and where they put them in their house, and the joy it’s brought to them. And people keep doing it over and over — once you learn what joy this can bring, people will keep doing it.
It’s a free service, so there’s no charge for it. I do take donations, and I raise money with community foundations and generous donors to keep this program going.
Rath: This seems like a great moment to have you say the website for people who want to help.
Doig: Sure. It’s a long name: SupportiveLivingInc.org/flowerbuds.
Rath: Is there a moment or exchange that particularly stays with you?
Doig: Let me think about that. There are so many.
There’s a woman in town who is over 90 — a very, very friendly and positive woman, but not very able to get around, doesn’t drive, etc. But she has asked me so many times, probably once every two weeks, she contacts me and says, “Can I come and weed the garden with you? Can I come and make some flowers for other people?”
I’m just so touched by that because here she is, 90, with a lot of her own issues, yet she still wants to help spread joy to others in her community.
Rath: Tell us a bit more about the volunteers you’re talking about who help you.
Doig: There are some people in the community who like flowers — [they] just like to do it, whatever part of being with flowers, they love it. They love the program itself, so they’ll do whatever is needed to make it work. Sometimes the tasks are not so much fun and don’t specifically involve flowers.
For example, I put the flowers into little mason jars before delivery, and that’s how they go out to the individuals, and they keep the jar. But, you can tell, I go through a lot of jars, and so [I’m] always collecting jars from people. I have a bucket outside the farm where people can just drop by and put their jars in this donation bucket, but they all need to be cleaned and scrubbed, so that’s a job that really [doesn’t] have anything to do with flowers, but it has to be done. People will do it because they want the program to succeed.
