"Pam Moore" wrote in message
...
I have a request for advice. My garden needs a rethink.
I have a small garden, 27feet by 15 feet. Yes, that small!

Due to macular degeneration I am losing central vision and am in the
process of being registered partially sighted. My peripheral vision
is normal but doesn't help to see fine detail.
Things are rather overgrown and I am having trouble keeping things
under control. I need to replace the invasive things.
Also I don't seem to have enough colour.


I can't advise you about plants but I can sympathise with the MD. Is yours
age related or myopic ? I have had myopic macular degeneration for ten years
now and am registered blind. It stared in my left eye when I was twenty one
and then occured the right eye a couple of years later, and got
progressively worse. However I have to say that mine is an extreme case due
to very high myopia (-19.50) so don't be alarmed ! Without knowing too much
about yours if you've got the more common version - age related - I very
much doubt you'll end up quite as "blind" as I am.

The eye megrims don't stop me doing what I want to do so much though - you
might catch me talking about photography in another thread. My very
obsession is extreme macro photography because it lets me see detail I can't
(and in some cases, detail the normal human eye can't either) see in real
life.

I too have to fight the good fight with the overgrown garden but it helps
that I have only a small part of it cultivated and the rest laid to lawn. I
weed religiously on my hands and knees every day (this is maybe why I have a
slipped disc !) and make sure I have plenty of space around the plants to be
able to get up close to them in order to weed and see them. I find I can
feel the weeds because unless they are established, they just don't feel
like "real plants". I can't explain that one so I'm sorry if it sounds abit
supernatural - it isn't, it's just a touch thing I suppose. There's that
myth that blind or visually impaired people have supernatural hearing or
touch - and IME that isn't so, we just make use of those senses better
because we choose to. You have to teach yourself how to do it though.

I do my seedlings indoors first, where no weeds can get a start in with
them, and then transfer to outside once they are large enough to handle -
which incidently seems to mean large enough for me to recognise them at arms
length by touch. Alot of my stuff is grown in pots too which helps because
you can crouch down next to them and really study what's growing in there
and what shouldn't be !
If I have to stretch to use the hoe in the two small beds (I sometimes do
despite my back screaming) I am in danger of hoeing up the plants along with
the weeds, so, I make sure I have some big plants that I can't miss. It also
helps that the cultivated part of the garden is in full sun for most of the
day - like some plants, we need alot of light to work in, us visually
impaired bods. :-)
I have a flower bed one side and a edible bed the other - which currently
has a few tomatoes and peppers in it. They smell enough for anyone to know
them without looking. ;-)

I was lucky though - I started this garden from stratch having had eye
problems already. I knew what my limitations were from the outset, if you
see what I mean.

Anyway --


You might be surprised how your brain begins to cope with the eye issues -
my peripheral is still good and my brain seemed to learn to rely on that in
time. It is a whilst since I've walked into anything and hurt myself, for
example, anyway. Don't know how long you've been suffering the eye problems
but I consciously tried to use my peripheral in the beginning to help the
ole think tank get the idea. I was quite young though and it's said that
helps, but you can give the grey matter a hand by forcing yourself to
concentrate on the peripheral. It is tiring and a right pain in the
fundament at first but it does work, honest. You might learn, like I did, to
look at things out of the corner of your eyes. I can't explain exactly how
you do that - it's like trying to tell someone how to have a sense of
balance on a bicycle - but what I am trying to get across is, don't despair,
there are things you can do to get around the issues. You might have been
told all this by your eye specialist, anyway.

I also find I have less colour - particularly in my left eye (the worst one)
which is light and shade only all over almost in black and white. I found
yellows went first. I see yellows as whiter, red as black or dark maroon,
and blues seem to be more greeny. Or did you mean you don't seem to have
enough colour in the graden, not the eyesight ? ;-)

I hope you can sort something out in the garden - I see lots of good
suggestions here from the posters. The eye issues needn't put a stop to it
for you, it can be done, so don't feel too dispirited about it (if you are
feeling that way).

Best wishes,

Rachael