A five-year-old girl can now look forward to spending the rest of summer tending to her backyard garden, all thanks to her dad.
Zoran Vujicic spent at least four weekends working on a garden for his daughter, making a dozen trips to local hardware stores and going through 80 bags of dirt.
“My wife and daughter were talking about this for a year, maybe a bit more,” Vujicic said. He decided to “give it a go” after seeing a photo his wife shared on Facebook of a wheelchair-accessible garden.
“He did great,” Vujicic’s daughter, Bella, said.
Born with sacral genesis, Bella uses a wheelchair to get around most of the time, Vujicic said.
The 12-square-metre garden features stones that allow Bella’s wheelchair to access the space easily.
“She’s a great kid, she’s always happy and smiling and always positive,” Vujicic said. “We’ve had to go to SickKids for surgeries and she’s bounced through them all and never complains.”
Vujicic admits that he didn’t do all the handiwork on his own. The father said his daughter was helpful in crafting the garden.
“She’s always one to help out with everything I do. … She helped me screw in the lights, she helped me cut some of the boards, she helped me screw in some of the posts, and of course [she] and her mother planted all of the plants.”
Vegetables and flowers grow in the Vujicics’ backyard garden – the latter chosen in memory of family friends that have passed away.
“We planted [the flowers] there so we could remember them,” Bella said.
With files from CTV Kitchener’s Randy Steinman
