Domestic gardens represent a site for enacting embodied identity and social relationships in later life, and negotiating tensions between continuity and change. In the context of dementia, domestic gardens have significant implications for ‘living well’ at home, and for wider discussions around embodiment, relational selfhood and agency. Yet previous studies exploring dementia and gardens have predominantly focused on care home or community contexts. In light of this, the paper explores the role of domestic gardens in the everyday lives of people living with dementia and their households, using qualitative, creative methods. This includes filmed walking interviews and garden tours, diaries and sketch methods, involving repeat visits with six households in England. Findings are organised thematically in relation to different ‘ways of being’ in the garden: working in and doing the garden; being in and sensing; and playing, empowerment and agency. These different ‘ways of being’ are situated within relationships with household members, neighbours and non-human actors, including pets, wildlife and the materiality of the garden. Garden practices illustrate continuity, situated within embodied biographies and habitus. However, identities, practices and gardens are also subject to ongoing readjustment and reconstruction. The conclusion discusses implications for extending literature on gardens and later life, describing how social and material relationships in domestic gardens are renegotiated in the context of dementia, while highlighting opportunities for ‘play’, active sensing and agency. We also explore contributions to understandings of dementia, home and place, and implications for garden design and care practice.

After spending seven years practising as a doctor in Boston, William Stukeley moved to London in 1717. The following years were his most fertile, but by 1725 he had become disillusioned with Town and decided to move to Grantham in his home county of Lincolnshire. During his brief stay, 1726–9, he modernised his seventeenth-century yeoman’s house, and simultaneously developed ideas on the religion of the Druids and garden design that were unique and interacted with each other. Both were greatly influenced by the archaeological discoveries he had made at Stonehenge and Avebury (1719–24). At the same time he gradually changed his ideas on Christianity, which led to ordination in 1729 and a great change in his life.

Spalding Gentlemen’s Society holds, among its varied collections of William Stukeley papers, a virtually unknown set of forty-four important drawings dating from 1720–64. It is an intimate collection closely connected with Stukeley and his immediate family: portraits, his houses and gardens in Lincolnshire and Kentish Town, and a few miscellaneous family history papers. Originally, the collection was bound into an album which, as the latest drawing dates from the year before Stukeley’s death, was almost certainly compiled post mortem by a family member. For many years the collection was lost, but recent investigation has revealed that c 1866–7 it was purchased by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., and sold at auction in 1910. It has been in Spalding ever since, arriving at the Spalding Gentlemen's Society possibly about 1950. Cataloguing the collection was recently undertaken by this author and the enhanced significance given by this and the revealed provenance enabled the Society to apply successfully to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant towards conservation and storage. The great value of the collection is that it hugely increases our knowledge of Stukeley’s houses and gardens, particularly his garden works, and illuminates the evolution of Stukeley’s thoughts on garden design.

This article presents an analysis of three uniquely situated garden-based research studies. As colleagues intrigued by the rich, intricate, learning dynamics playing out within the garden spaces, our collaboration explored the broader meaning and potential for garden-based programming. As we discussed the three garden studies, two themes emerged as valuable for analysis: relationality and decolonisation. We understand the themes in relation to Gregory Cajete’s (2005) conceptualisation of coming to resonance within oneself, one’s community, and the surrounding ecosystem as being integral aspects of a holistic learning program. In addition, centring learning around relationality with place requires, as Delores Calderon (2014) asserts, a critique of colonisation that has shaped place over time. In our collaboration on the three studies and reading of current developments in the literature, it became clear that garden- and place-based education must grapple with the troubled histories of place and work towards decolonisation. Each garden project provided unique insight, but our collective analysis elicited an examination of assumptions about pedagogy and potential for decolonisation of land, body, and minds.

This article documents the ḥawākīr of Nazareth. Once widespread in the city, these traditional domestic gardens were integral to households of all economic backgrounds. They served as a space for work and socializing, constituted a center of collective (extended family) life, and provided a wide diversity of crops. However, in recent decades ḥawākīr have disappeared rapidly as new houses were built overtop them and residents’ tastes changed. Today people prefer gardens with green lawns and flowers. Intended strictly for recreation and ornament, this new kind of garden acts as a marker of privacy and economic success. We use ethnographic data to provide detailed descriptions of historical and contemporary examples of the traditional garden. The analysis dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival to generate urban sustainability.

Research shows that contact with nature plays a vital role in our psychological wellbeing. Domestic gardening is common among older adults who spend more leisure hours gardening than any other age group. Despite this, few studies have systematically explored the significance of domestic gardens in relation to older adults' health and wellbeing. This study examined the perceived therapeutic benefits of gardening, and the effect of ageing in relation to older gardeners' continued participation in gardening, using quantitative and qualitative data from a survey of Australian older adult gardeners (N=331). The quantitative data, which included frequencies, were analysed using the PASW Statistics 18.0 package. The qualitative data, which included participants' responses to open questions, were analysed by deriving themes via Leximancer, an innovative text analytics software that uses word association information to elicit concepts, extracting the most important and grouping these according to themes. In relation to the reasons for gardening, several themes were identified including valuing the aesthetics of gardens, connecting with nature, achievement, and physical and mental activity. The benefits of gardening, and the variety of ways that respondents had adapted or modified their gardening activities in order to continue, are also reported. Gardening was more than a casual leisure pursuit for these participants, who saw it as critical to their physical and psychological wellbeing.

Exploring the relocation and reuse of fragments and whole artefacts, materials and monuments in contemporary commemorative memorials in the United Kingdom (UK), this paper focuses on the National Memorial Arboretum (Alrewas, Staffordshire, hereafter NMA). Within this unique assemblage of memorial gardens, reuse constitutes a distinctive range of material commemoration. Through a detailed investigation of the NMA's gardens, this paper shows how monument and material reuse, while used in very different memorial forms, tends to be reserved to commemorate specific historical subjects and themes. Monument and material reuse is identified as a form of commemorative rehabilitation for displaced memorials and provides powerful and direct mnemonic and emotional connections between past and present in the commemoration through peace memorials, of military disasters and defensive actions, the sufferings of prisoners of war, and atrocities inflicted upon civilian populations. In exploring monument and material reuse to create specific emotive and mnemonic fields and triggers, this paper engages with a hitherto neglected aspect of late 20th- and early 21st-century commemorative culture.

During three breeding seasons, 1994-96, the habitats of song thrushes were studied in north-east Essex, U.K., in 10 tetrads (total 40 km2) of mainly farmland habitat and 35 woods of differing sizes (range 0.1-57.0 ha). Within tetrads, only 6 (3.5%) territories were found in farmland. Gardens held 123 (71.5%) territories, though this habitat made up only 2% of the total area, while 39 (22.7%) were in woodlands (1% of total area). Population densities were much lower in the tetrads than in earlier studies; this may be an indication of the severe population decline that the species has recently undergone. Densities in gardens differed less from those of previous studies.

In the woodland study, the number of woods holding song thrush territories declined over the three years, while the proportion of total territories in the six largest woods increased. Densities in the woods were lower than those reported in earlier studies but the disparity was not as great as in farmland. Extinctions in the smaller woods was 20-30% per annum, a rate similar to that for gardens: population extinctions did not occur in the larger woods.

Some 40% of non-garden territories in the surveys of both tetrads and woodland plots were within 100 m of a garden. Gardens may be currently acting as a refuge for song thrushes and an understanding of the ecology of the species in different types of gardens may be important in current conservation efforts for the species.