1 September 2022
Every Wednesday Valma Pettit gets up early, puts on her gumboots and heads to Harbour Hospice. There, she spends the next few hours working in the hospice gardens.
Valma has volunteered as a gardener for hospice, in Red Beach, for the past 10 years. She started out as the only female in a group of five men, and had joined because the apartment she and her late husband had recently moved into in Orewa had no garden.
At that time, the hospice gardens were tended by several different sets of volunteers from the community.
“We each had an allocated area, and woe betide anybody who ventured outside their area,” Valma laughs.
“But what we noticed was that the tennis club never came, they were too busy playing tennis. So, we oozed into their territory, then we started oozing all over the place.”
Eventually, Valma’s group was the only one that was still going. Then even their numbers began to dwindle as people left the estate or passed away.
“I needed more help,” she says. “So I asked the members of the Orewa Garden Club that I belong to. And that’s how I have the great support that I have now.”
Valma is regularly joined on Wednesdays by six or seven of her Garden Club friends. At times their numbers have swelled to 11 and Valma encourages them all to claim their own little patches of garden so they can develop them and feel a sense of ownership.
She also encourages the group to work in pairs. “That way the time goes quickly, and you chatter away and it’s lovely to hear a happy environment. If the patients come outside they hear them talking and laughing and it provides a little bit of normality for them.”
If Valma had her “time again” she says she’d be a horticulturalist. “I just love being amongst nature, and I love creating. It’s productive and very good for you, health-wise.
“And when we’re at hospice, if we pass by a window and it suddenly bursts open and someone pops their head out to say hello, that’s what makes it all worthwhile.”
This story first appeared in Hibiscus Matters on 8 August 2022, you can read it here.
