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

The authors' study, and this book, was prompted after seeing many designed care and dementia gardens fall out of use once the initial novelty of a new garden had worn off, this is clearly not what was intended by any designer. But 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 alongside their care clients to create well used gardens that benefit residents long after the designer has left. 

Their research 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 illuminative 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 workflow.

The handbook provides a detailed yet easy to use Care Culture Banding tool, identifying the current organisational 'care culture' influencing engagement through a range of simple questions to ask, areas to investigate and then recommends on the most beneficial support to provide at this stage.

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 who work there as well as the residents who live there.  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 any garden changes. 

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 book compliments their 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 setting the groundwork for a garden that is actively used long term and benefits the residents who live there.

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. 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 passionate about gardens being actively used. Her 20years of designing across a range of settings has always been driven by the belief that ‘the gardens that last are the gardens that are loved’, and it is this very human factor that resonates throughout their books. Debbie is an Accredited Garden Designer with the British Association of Landscape Industries, Special Adviser on the Outdoors for the National Activity Providers Association and on a personal mission to ensure care home doors are open to the garden. Debbie continues to run Step Change Design into its 2nd decade sharing their research through this book a 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.