Outside space


A new garden – what happens after the novelty period?


Understanding care culture is crucial to successful outside space design that creates enduring and meaningful engagement with this important part of a care home’s environment, writes Debbie Carrolland Mark Rendell.


When creating a new care home garden designers need to capture the needs and wishes of the settings - often via a wish list that, along with wider physical site data, forms the foundation of our client brief. Additional focus groups with the home’s residents and staff may also take place to aid


an understanding of the rationale behind this list. And yet, we can predict that there will


be a key piece of information missing from the wish list, and therefore the client brief, that neither the designer nor the care home participants would have included, which


Why care homes don’t use gardens


The key findings in our 2016 research project that underpins our ‘Care Culture Map and Handbook Why don’t we go into the garden?’ on what makes care setting gardens more actively used were: There is a correlation between


advanced care culture practices (i.e. relationship-centred care) and truly active engagement with the outside space regardless of the condition,


appearance or design of the space and the time of year, Fearful attitudes towards health and


safety effectively cap engagement levels with the outdoors, and the garden designer needs to match and support the current care culture of the setting to avoid over-designing the space and prevent investment in the new outside space becoming a waste of money.


covers the organisation’s own care culture, and how it informs attitudes and practices relating to the current outside space. Our research found an understanding


of care culture is crucially important to successful garden design as it directly influences the activity and meaningful engagement levels with it long after the designer has left. The study revealed a range of attitudes


and practices relating to the outside space that we were able to plot along a ‘care culture spectrum’, from settings where the doors were firmly locked, often in facilities where the care culture was ‘task focused’, and where the garden was either not used at all or only in limited ways, through to those with a ‘person-centred’ care approach who were focused on meeting individual’s residents wishes, needs and interests. In higher performing care homes, we observed meaningful engagement with


24 www.thecarehomeenvironment.com May 2026


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40