How gardening can help cancer survivors during recovery

Having cancer is difficult at the best of times.

But for Perri Chaplin, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year at age 32, the coronavirus pandemic has made her recovery even more challenging.

"I was immunocompromised from the chemotherapy — [if] you get a cold, you can die. So I would go grocery shopping with a mask on even before COVID," says Perri, who lives in the Noosa Hinterland on the Sunshine Coast.

Perri had a double mastectomy in April, the same week that COVID restrictions hit Queensland — and in the weeks following her surgery, she decided to plant a vegetable garden.

"It began as a way of ensuring my family had a sustainable food supply while reducing trips to the supermarket," Perri says.

But she soon realised that tending her veggie garden had other benefits.

"It's been my therapy, rehabilitation, and my all-round happy place to take the anxiety of the outside happenings of COVID away. It's brilliant," she says.

Healthy homegrown produce

Perri and her three kids now eat from the garden "every day", often adding eggs from the chickens on the property.

"I've made salads, stir-fries, curries, pastas, and lots of bakes with fresh vegetables from the garden," says Perri, whose partner is a FIFO worker currently unable to get back from Western Australia.

"We're not vegetarians, but we are eating maybe four nights a week vegetarian now."

Perri often has such an abundance of food that she's able to share with the neighbours — fostering physically-distant connections at a time where

It saves money on grocery bills, reduces trips to crowded supermarkets, and it's not as hard as it looks.

Gardening has also helped build Perri's physical strength.

"When you're going through chemo, you're given drugs that are partially killing you, and along with that you get steroids — plus you're immobile so you don't do anything," she says.

But now she's into gardening and has been delighted to feel her body begin to bounce back as her veggie patch grows.

Research backs benefits for people recovering from cancer

Perri got the all-clear from her rehabilitation nurse before starting her garden: "She was happy enough for me to be doing things as long as I felt strong enough to do it," Perri says.

"She just said, if it hurts, stop."

That's broadly in line with current evidence-based guidelines, which suggest people with cancer "be as physically active as their current ability and conditions allow".

The Cancer Council points out that for people recovering from cancer, the benefits of physical activity can include: managing some of the common side effects of treatment, speeding up recovery, improving quality of life, and even helping reduce the risk of some cancer types recurring. (For the purposes of this definition, gardening is classified as a 'low-intensity exercise,' the Council notes.)

Wendy Demark-Wahnefried is associate director of cancer prevention and control at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and principal investigator of a study called Harvest for Health, an at-home gardening intervention for cancer patients who have completed their primary cancer treatment.

She says the studies have found that people who have survived cancer can do several physical tasks much better after a year of gardening, including tests of endurance and arm strength tests. They also tend to eat healthier.

"One of the primary reasons that we chose vegetable gardening is the potential for an improved diet, and we observe statistically significant increases of one serving a day of vegetables," Dr Demark-Wahnefried says.

It's life-affirming

But the benefits are not only physical.

Dr Demark-Wahnefried has found that cancer survivors who take up vegetable gardening "have significant improvements in a measure called 'Reassurance of Worth' — a measure that is indicative of how much people feel like they have a purpose and give to back to the community," she says. (Reassurance of Worth is the opposite of feeling worthless, she explains.)

Perri agrees that working in the garden has worked wonders on her mental wellbeing.

"Your head plays games when you're given a diagnosis that could potentially kill you," she says.

"But watching things grow with my strength has been so amazing for my head. I watered them and grew with them."

While Perri expects to undergo further surgeries in the future, gardening has been central to helping her find fulfilment as she rehabilitates.

Now 33, she hopes her story will help newly diagnosed cancer patients "take a positive out of such a terrible negative".

"I'd love for other cancer patients and survivors to see what life after cancer can be if you make it," she says.