Why Don’t We Go into the Garden? The Care Culture Map and Handbook

Author Biography

Debbie Carroll and Mark Rendell are both Garden Designers who teamed up in 2012 to find the answer to a deceptively simple question they had. The research they carried out to answer the question, "Why aren't care gardens more actively used?", is the subject of their series of books and tools in the 'Why don't we go into the garden?' series. Their self-funded 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.Step Change Design was formed to share their findings and promote their 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 and a passion for creating gardens 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 and this along with her enquiring mind, and tenacity to implement changes, has often resulted in improvements both at an individual and organisational level. Debbie continues to run Step Change Design focusing on sharing the key findings through their various publications, workshops, presentations and supporting care settings and designers directly on new ways of working together. Step Change Design is a recognised supplier of the National Activities Providers Association. 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 writing projects, consolidate his diverse work experiences and to (finally) complete the renovation of his 200 year old property in Snowdonia.