The Experience Garden invites visitors with to engage with nature through touch, sound, and sight. It provides an opportunity to reconnect with nature and share experiences in a peaceful, supportive environment. The textured surfaces, soothing sounds of rain and windchimes, and fragrant plants create an atmosphere that encourages interaction, reflection, and conversation. Accessible to all, including wheelchair users, the garden promotes both individual moments of calm and shared activities, improving social engagement and strengthening bonds.
Can outdoor environments support people with dementia and their partners’ well-being?
The Experience Garden offers a variety of tactile activities, inviting visitors to engage with nature through touch, sound, and sight. For couples, particularly those where one partner has dementia, the garden provides an opportunity to reconnect and share experiences in a peaceful, supportive environment. The textured surfaces, soothing sounds of rain and windchimes, and fragrant plants create an atmosphere that encourages interaction, reflection, and conversation. Accessible to all, including wheelchair users, the garden promotes both individual moments of calm and shared activities, improving social engagement and strengthening bonds. It’s a space where nature, memory, and relationships can flourish together.
The Experience Garden is a dynamic, natural environment designed especially for people with dementia who often lose connection with nature to reconnect with their environment and rediscover themselves. Given the limited nature experiences of people at all stages of dementia, the garden offers a range of opportunities for other elements of nature to be introduced and enhanced in the built environment. The design of quality care environments, including products and layouts, can activate a sense of connection to nature through installations, materials and technologies. These installations allow visitors to engage with multisensory plants and nature enhancers, providing an opportunity to recreate a connection that is often lost, especially in urban and sterile environments.
We designed the Experience especially to enhance the relationship of couples where one partner has dementia. Our aim was to support the well-being of the partner, allowing them to steer away from the role of caregiver and replenish the role of spouse. The garden addresses this by incorporating senses of touch, sight, smell and sound to stimulate and enhance a shared experience. This enhances the shared experience, providing great conversation starters and icebreakers, Couples can explore their interpersonal connection in a garden which offers new experiences every time they visit. For people with dementia, both passive and active interactions with nature can be calming, activating or reassuring. In this way, the garden improves their and their partners’ quality of life.
