Maintenance gardeners play an important role in the day-to-day running of caregiving facilities, ensuring the well-being of residents. The landscapers who maintain caregiving facilities are responsible for keeping the greenery healthy and lush, but that’s only part of their responsibilities. They also help ensure cleanliness by pruning trees and shrubs, removing weeds, fertilizing the soil to encourage growth, and more.
Landscapers who maintain caregiving facilities work hard to ensure that everything is in place for resident satisfaction at every moment—a task they say is incredibly rewarding.
“It’s not just about tilling the land or planting flowers,” said one landscaper who maintains a large senior living center in California. “We make sure there are no dead leaves around walkways to prevent people from slipping…we want these people to be as safe as can be. We want them to feel good—to look at their landscape and think, ‘I love this place.'”
Maintenance gardeners spend anywhere from 40 to 60 hours on the job each week, performing day-to-day tasks that keep the facility’s greenery healthy and clean. For most landscapers who maintain caregiving facilities, every day is different than the next. Some say they don’t have anything particularly difficult about their jobs; others find it incredibly difficult balancing everything that gets thrown at them.
“There are always little things here and there,” said one Florida landscaper who maintains a senior living center with over 500 residents. “You’ll be working on trees one day, pruning or removing dead leaves…the next, you’ll be fertilizing the grass or weeding. It really just depends.”
Though landscapers who maintain caregiving facilities say many residents are incredibly grateful for their work, there are also quite a few challenges. The biggest challenge is time management—working in an outdoor environment means rain can affect productivity at any moment. Even worse, sometimes it’s hard to get every single weed out of the ground—especially when they’re spread all over an expansive landscape–and that can mean not finishing certain tasks by the end of the day.
