If you have an elderly parent that has to have indoor care, they may become depressed. You need to watch out for these signs so you can take action quickly. To help keep depression away, you can use flowers and gardening as a way to help them.

Create a Flower Garden

A spring garden can make your parent feel happy knowing they have something to care for and seeing the beautiful flowers grow. Place the flower garden in an area where your parent can see it from a nearby window.

Gardening in itself is exercise, and helps to improve mobility and flexibility in the body while getting soil ready and planting flowers in the ground. If your parent is in a wheelchair, you could set up a table at the right height and let them plant container flowers. You could also create a raised flower garden so they can have a place to sit while they are gardening.

Pick Flowers

Plant flowers that your parent can go outside and pick to bring inside. Purchase some colorful vases and help your parent arrange the flowers in beautiful arrangements. You can then sit the vase somewhere close to them.  There are many flowers that can be picked, and you can even create a cut flower garden. Some flowers that are great for cutting include:

• Black-eyed Susan
• Coneflower
• Cosmos
• Snapdragon
• Poppy

Choose flowers in a variety of colors to make the garden colorful. All of these flowers are quick growing so you will have your cutting garden in no time.

Press Flowers

Pressing flowers will allow your parent to enjoy them all year long. This is something that is easy to do and they should be able to do on their own or do with some help from the caregiver. They need to pick the flowers while they are still budding, or ones that have just started to bloom.

Cut any leaves off the flowers that they do not want to press, place the flowers in a plastic bag with a zip lock, and place them in the refrigerator overnight.

Sandwich the flowers between two pieces of paper. This can be printer paper or flat cardboard, and then place the paper that you choose between the pages of a heavy book. Close the book and after approximately two to three weeks the flowers will be completely dried out. Your parent can then place the flowers in a picture frame and hang the frame near them.

Talk to your parent about things they would like to do at home with the in home caregiver. For more information, contact companies like Accu-Care Nursing Service Inc.