Why Don't We Go Into the Garden?: A Designer Handbook for Creating Actively Used Care Setting Gardens: 2

A Designer Handbook for Creating Actively Used Care Setting Gardens
Designing for care environments is both rewarding and challenging. This book shares the research on what it takes to create actively used care home gardens that benefit Residents long after the designer has left. Illustrated with real examples it supports garden designers to work effectively with care clients to create actively used care gardens.

Creating well-being, sensory and dementia friendly gardens in care homesand other organisational environments is both rewarding and challenging. Thisbook guides garden designers to work more effectively alongside their care andorganisational clients to create well used and well-loved gardens for the longterm benefit of the residents and users there. The authors' study wasprompted after seeing many designed care and dementia gardens fall out of useonce the initial novelty of a new space had worn off, this is clearly not whatwas intended nor environmentally sustainable.

They set out to answer the deceptively simple question of 'what makescare gardens actively used' and their findings shocked and challenged them; herethey share their own journey and through many inspiring case studies show howthis can be applied by others working in this field.

The authors' research identified a correlation between care homespracticing more advanced, person-centred, care with greater engagement outside.This handbook guides the reader through a range of stages to better support CareSettings, and other organisation's, by applying a 'Relationship-CentredDesign' approach to design delivery. This ensures the organisationalculture is understood and incorporated into all stages of a design's processensuring a garden is used long after the designer has left.

The handbook provides a detailed yet practical and easy to use tool to identifythe current organisational 'care culture' influencing engagement by providing arange of simple questions to ask, areas to validate or investigate and then recommendsthe most beneficial support to provide.

Real-life stories illuminate this thought-provoking book bringing tolife how to ensure gardens are meaningfully developed and used, and withparticular reference to people living with dementia. It guides the reader into theimpact of the wider care organisation's practices, the people supporting thosewho live there, and how, and even if, they enable the garden to be used byresidents. This book should be in the toolbox for all garden designers workingwith care, or other institutional, settings providing guidance from the firstcontact with a client right through to implementation of the most appropriatesupport that may be required. This may not be what is traditionallyexpected.

A wider range of care related design insights are also exploredincluding several hidden dangers where designers can inadvertently introducenew obstacles to engagement, avoiding adding gimmicks, along with some quickwins.

Finally, there is a 'call to action' for more research, in this underinvestigated field, on areas where conflicts exist between current gardendesign guidance and observed positive, yet contradictory, practices. Theauthors' aim with this book is to support the continuing development of bestpractices for Garden Designers that is aligned with, and supportive of, thecare sectors requirement to deliver person-centred care.

This handbook compliments the earlier published 'Care Culture Map andHandbook' which supports care settings on a culture change journey to improvedcare practices and greater engagement outside and is part of the 'Why don'twe go into the garden?' series of books and tools. The two publicationssupport the necessary changes in practices to both parties, carers anddesigner, in creating a new garden with greatest likelihood of it beingactively used for the long term benefiting the residents who live there andensuring wise investment too.

Illustrator: Paul Weston, Dawn Terrey, Mark Rendell

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