🔍 Why don’t we go into the garden? – A Designer Handbook for Creating Actively Used Care Setting Gardens

By Debbie Carroll

This care home garden design handbook supports garden designers, and those who support care settings, to create well-used and well-loved care home garden designs. Based on our extensive research project into what makes care home gardens more actively used. In it we share a new way of working with care settings called ‘Relationship-Centred Design’. This approach ensures that design support matches the current care culture of the setting to reduce the risk of the design investment leading to an under-used or abandoned garden once the novelty of a new space has worn off.

Real-life stories illuminate this thought provoking book and brings to life how to ensure gardens are meaningfully developed and used, and with particular reference to people living with dementia.

It is also worth stating what this Handbook is not; it is not a guide to what the gradient of a ramp should be nor other installation specifics; many other books cover these topics effectively.

It does however provide a detailed ‘Care Culture Banding tool’ to assess the care culture at a setting and the suggested support to apply to match this appropriately. This is most helpful at the beginning of any relationship between garden designers and care home clients, ensuring an appropriate initial brief and the implementation of support delivered alongside any changes needed to care practices too.

A range of wider insights are also explored that may need to be considered if even the best intended garden is to avoid inadvertently hindering future engagement by care settings. This includes; a range of hidden dangers, avoiding gimmicks and some quick wins.

ISBN No. 9780993573712
Wire bound/ Number of pages: 76
Dimensions: 254 x 178 x 12 mm Weight: 295 g