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

Creating well-being, sensory and dementia friendly gardens in care homes and other organisational environments is both rewarding and challenging. This book guides garden designers to work more effectively alongside their care and organisational clients to create well used and well-loved gardens for the long term benefit of the residents and users there. The authors' study was prompted after seeing many designed care and dementia gardens fall out of use once the initial novelty of a new space had worn off, this is clearly not what was intended nor environmentally sustainable.

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

The authors' research identified a correlation between care homes practicing more advanced, person-centred, care with greater engagement outside. This handbook guides the reader through a range of stages to better support Care Settings, and other organisation's, by applying a 'Relationship-Centred Design' approach to design delivery. This ensures the organisational culture is understood and incorporated into all stages of a design's process ensuring a garden is used long after the designer has left.

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

Real-life stories illuminate this thought-provoking book bringing to life how to ensure gardens are meaningfully developed and used, and with particular reference to people living with dementia. It guides the reader into the impact of the wider care organisation's practices, the people supporting those who live there, and how, and even if, they enable the garden to be used by residents. This book should be in the toolbox for all garden designers working with care, or other institutional, settings providing guidance from the first contact with a client right through to implementation of the most appropriate support that may be required. This may not be what is traditionally expected.

A wider range of care related design insights are also explored including several hidden dangers where designers can inadvertently introduce new obstacles to engagement, avoiding adding gimmicks, along with some quick wins.

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

This handbook compliments the earlier published 'Care Culture Map and Handbook' which supports care settings on a culture change journey to improved care practices and greater engagement outside and is part of the 'Why don't we go into the garden?' series of books and tools. The two publications support the necessary changes in practices to both parties, carers and designer, in creating a new garden with greatest likelihood of it being actively used for the long term benefiting the residents who live there and ensuring wise investment too.

Debbie Carroll and Mark Rendell are both Garden Designers who teamed up to find the answer to a deceptively simple question they had "Why aren't care gardens more actively used?" This is the subject of their series of books and tools in the 'Why don't we go into the garden?' series. Their research project grew to be one of the largest of its kind in the UK and took them into new territory (for garden designers) deep inside care settings. During this process, they drew on many diverse and complementary skills from their earlier careers to form a unique collaboration that enabled them to articulate creatively and sensitively their often challenging findings, and what this means for both designers and carers. They founded Step Change Design to share their findings and promote their new design approach, 'Relationship-Centred Design', with both the care and design sectors.

Debbie Carroll is an Accredited Garden Designer with the British Association of Landscape Industries based in Southern England. She has 20 years' experience through her design business, Debbie Carroll Garden Designs, and has a passion for creating gardens that are well used and well loved, whether within a domestic or care setting. Her experiences designing dementia care home gardens was a major influence on the research project that followed. While her background in the Armed Forces, and a Retail Manager within John Lewis Partnership, honed her people development skills it was her inquiring mind, and tenacity to implement changes to create improvements both at an individual and organisational level that adds a depth to the insights shared in this book. Debbie continues to run Step Change Design into its 2nd decade sharing their research through this book within a wide range of workshops, webinars and other speaking opportunities.

Mark Rendell is a project manager, coach, gardener and garden designer based in North Wales. He set up 'The Growing Company' in 2000, primarily to raise awareness of the importance of the outdoors in aiding healing, recovery and respite in health and care settings. With a background in Health (he worked in the NHS on HIV/AIDS related issues in the 90s) and in Environmental Projects (he set up the UK's telephone directory recycling schemes on behalf of BT and Yellow Pages in 1998), he is also a trainer and project manager specialising in behaviour change, team dynamics and project management. Mark left Step Change Design in December 2021 after writing the Designer Handbook with Debbie in order to pursue his many other projects, consolidate his diverse work experiences and to (finally) complete the renovation of his 200 year old property in Snowdonia.