His Garden Grows

“My exercise focus is on gardening,” Arthur Canfield, 83, of Fairfax, Virginia, told us. “I hate the thought of exercise for exercise’s sake. I’ve never done that,” he said.

Mr. Canfield grew up close to the soil. He remembers driving horses pulling hay, sometimes all day, and carrying water down to the garden on his uncle’s farm. His wife grew up in a family that made its living in the wholesale florist trade, so she, too, understood gardens.

Mr. Canfield and his wife brought their lifelong affinity for gardening with them into their marriage. When they settled in Fairfax, near Mr. Canfield’s job as an economist, the house they bought had about an acre of land, and they worked it — and worked it. “I didn’t want to be deskbound when I became a bureaucrat. That’s when I decided to become a serious gardener,” he said.

Gardening, Mr. Canfield told us, gives you an opportunity to exercise every part of your body and get satisfaction out of it at the same time. He said that gardening does more than build muscle and endurance.

“You have to keep your balance. You’re reaching up to prune trees, bending over to check your tomato plants. The actual energy output at any given moment may not amount to much, but your whole system is participating the whole time,” he said. It adds up.

Mr. Canfield lives on his own and drives himself wherever he needs to go. He works in his garden 3 or 4 hours every day.

“It’s got to be fun,” he said. “I like to work what I do into a rhythmic pattern. Splitting wood, chopping down trees — the rhythmic pattern of exercise is like music. You’re absolutely a free spirit. You forget about it as you’re doing it.”

Mr. Canfield thinks that the idea of exercise sounds grim to most people — as though they have to do it, because there will be penalties if they don’t.

“But raking leaves is not something you should dread; it’s a joyous thing. In New England, it’s as much of an event as sugaring-off the maples; it’s the center of things for a while,” he said.

He wants to give other older adults the following message about increasing their physical activity: “Once they start, they’ll see that it builds on itself. It feels so good.”