Lazy Susan garden for the wheelchair-bound

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Pasadena designer Laramee Haynes has come up with a wonderful idea for those who are wheelchair-bound or simply not able to get down on their hands and knees to tend their gardens. Dubbed the ‘accessible edible garden,’ Haynes’ creation amounts to a giant Lazy Susan: a truck axle combined with a sturdy metal base to support an 8-foot-diameter redwood top. Garden beds raised to table height enable wheelchair users to reach their plants with ease. (Haynes, shown above, is not wheelchair-bound but used one to test out his universal design.)

The garden-in-the-round is perfect for growing herbs and small row crops like radishes and lettuces around the shallower perimeter, with cherry tomatoes and peppers farther back, where the bed becomes deeper. A wheelchair fits comfortably under the tabletop -- which weighs up to 1,000 pounds when filled with soil, but moves easily with a touch of the hand.

Haynes, a former engineer who took over his father’s landscaping business 10 years ago, says, ‘It’s the first time I’ve blended my old and new life together making a mechanical device that’s also a garden.’ What a lovely marriage of science and nature. Bravo! www.hayneslandscaping.com

Laramee Haynes, a former engineer, fashions his elevated garden-in-the-round from a tire axle welded to a sturdy metal base. The recycled, 8-foot diameter top is made from pieces of a redwood deck and turns easily by hand, so the physically challenged can garden with ease.

-- Barbara Thornburg

Photos courtesy of Laramee Haynes