Gardening Your Way
To More Free Time
By Kate Sullivan-Foley
Senior News Correspondent

“Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” is a book for the gardener who wants to change their planting routine to incorporate a fitness plan. The authors, Bunny Guinness, a garden designer and landscape architect, and Jacqueline Knox, a physiotherapist, pooled their talents to create this all encompassing resource guide to fit gardening.

Although at times detail intensive, the book is user-friendly and extremely informative. One of the best suggestions in the book is the forewarning that before creating or renovating a garden, you should first decide how much time you can allot to maintaining it.

Throughout the book, the point is validly made that by factoring exercise into gardening most people can easily add more free time into their busy schedule. For example, if you work your cardio into your gardening, you don’t need to spend that hour out walking or at the gym.

For those who don’t believe this point, the authors highlight a number of gardening routines which burn substantial calories. In just one hour of weeding, for example, a person can burn 290 calories. Digging for an hour can burn 325 calories.

Starting in the very first chapter, the authors discuss the countless ways to fit exercise into gardening. At first, they stress the importance of stretching before gardening. They show readers how to incorporate walking, Pilates and Swiss Ball exercises into their gardening routine. The step-by-step color photos of the exercises make the written explanations easier to understand and implement.

Proper physical care as well as injury prevention and treatment are addressed with some very valuable tips. For example, the authors encourage readers who have sustained injuries while gardening to look into lightweight and ergonomic gardening tools. The new tools can decrease the risk of injuries and make gardening easier.

Proper use of gardening equipment is also essential, according to the authors. The correct way to move body parts, especially hands, back and feet, while gardening are discussed.

The middle part of the book covers all the information needed if you are thinking about renovating an existing garden or designing a new one. The ideas presented are more than plentiful. Again, the color photos are perfectly related to the text and certainly help the reader to better understand each idea.

With each design, the authors offer countless variations to incorporate almost any need. Throughout the section, the writers maintain the exercise theme. They often point out ways to add decorative items, like a bench or sunken trampoline, to essentially create an outdoor gym in the garden.

As the book progresses, there are some common sense comments about lawns, including the proper way to mow a lawn as well as information on raking and edging.

Closer to the end of the book, there is a valuable section on developing planting schemes. Although a little overly descriptive, I found this section helpful and informative in my current plans for a small summer vegetable garden.

The authors cover all options from plants to trees and hedges to vegetables. They explain what items go best together as well as the optimal times to plant each item. The book ends with recommendations for growing easy and rewarding vegetables, plants and herbs.

“Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” is not a quick, easy read. It is definitely more of a reference guide than a lazy day summer story. From page one through the end, the authors get their point across that it is both possible and beneficial to add exercise to a gardening routine.

“Garden Your Way to Health and Fitness” is published by Timber Press and sells for $19.95. You may contact Timberpress by calling (800) 827-5622 or visit their web site at www.timberpress.com.