A Nurse’s Take on “Dirt” Therapy: Interview with Shari McHarg Froelich
Today I’m excited to welcome Shari McHarg Froelich to the blog. Shari is a nurse turned flower farmer. Below is a thoughtful essay she wrote about her relationship with flowers.
“I grew up around flowers. My grandmother always had the best gladiolus available on their berry farm. I spent a lot of time on that farm enjoying the sweetness of the berries and farm life.
Shari when she was a little girl. She said it was her first awareness of loving flowers.
My mom and her three sisters carried on the passion for flowers and started growing their own when they got married and enjoyed sharing photos of their beauties. It seemed to be a long distance bond between them. They lovingly planted any kind that was easy to grow in their respective homes and states.
While I appreciated flowers, I chose to be a working wife and mom and put the majority of my efforts into my family and my nursing career. I had little time for fuss, but did manage to grow a few perennials along the way. I soon discovered that I when I came home from a long shift at work caring for sick people, and after a long drive home, I would get out of the car, still with my white uniform on and go directly to my flower beds and pull weeds. I quickly realized this activity was my way of de-stressing from both the work day and the long commute home.
Over the years my flower beds grew, along with me advancing my nursing education. In 1998, my mom was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and I went home to take care of her. I walked around her lovingly kept flowers and realized that I knew very few of their names. I went back inside and asked my mom what they were called. Her response to me was, ‘oh honey! I must not have done a very good job in teaching you!’ She did do a good job, but I was so caught up in my own life that I didn’t stop to really pay attention. I wrote down as many as she could identify by my descriptions of them. When I returned home after her death, I made a commitment that I’d do my best to learn the flower names and grow flowers to honor her life.
I took my first Master Gardener training and certification that next year and did learn and grow, but not to the extent that I would have liked. Along the way, I had more and more nursing positions and I remember so vividly that during my interviews I was always asked how did I see myself in 5 years. Of course I knew enough how to spit out the answer they were looking for, but in my head I was saying, ‘growing flowers.’
A few years later I moved back to my home state and due to the time and travel requirements, I couldn’t transfer my Master Gardener certification to my home state. I started growing more and more flowers and the weeding remained my come home and de-stress therapy activity. Fast forward many more years and I eventually became a psychiatric nurse practitioner and often my prescribed treatment to my patients was to garden and grow flowers!
As Covid hit, and I was getting closer to retirement age, I knew that I needed more “dirt” therapy myself. One of the blessings of Covid was that the Master Gardener Training and certification was now offered by Zoom! I signed up for it in the fall of 2020 and along the way, I started to follow Floret Farms and discovered a winter 6-week workshop. I signed up and KNEW what it was that I was going to do in retirement! I hadn’t retired at that point in time and thought I’d start small. I ventured into my first year of growing cut flowers as an attempt to bring joy to others and to provide me my own continued therapy, along with once again being physically active after many years of a sedentary lifestyle. I thought I had started small enough to see what I could do as I was no longer a young woman.
That first year was incredibly rewarding and frustrating. I had more than enough of weed therapy, but also managed to grow many more beautiful flowers than I thought I would after experiencing so many unsuccessful attempts at getting flowers to grow. Annual cut flowers were very “fussy” compared to my less fussy perennials, but I loved what I was doing.
Shari’s first delivery to the nursing home that had cared for her brother during Covid.
I was not able to sell very many blooms that year, so I ended up donating them to a couple of local nursing homes to cheer up the patients and the staff alike. Covid had restricted anyone from visiting the patients in the nursing homes and it was my hope that at least a bit of color, fragrance and fond memories would temporarily cheer them up.
As we approach the growing season for 2022, I’m a bit more knowledgeable and recently discovered soil blocking as a growing method. It has had the same kind of therapeutic benefit as weeding! I also did 100 gallon jugs of winter sowing to help with my own seasonal affective disorder (SAD) while waiting for spring to arrive.
Flower therapy and growing flowers has been beneficial to myself and so many others and is often an unrecognized and perhaps an unappreciated source of providing simple mental health measures!”
