The ASLA Healthcare and Therapeutic Design Professional Practice Network is pretty much the closest thing we have right now to a national organization for outdoor healthcare design.
They’ve just released the new newsletter, and it’s a good one: http://host.asla.org/groups/tgdpigroup/HTD08.pdf. You can access all of the newsletters on the HTD PPN site: http://host.asla.org/groups/tgdpigroup/newsletter.htm.
I hope to go into more detail about some of the articles in the future, but here are some highlights:
- The DreamTree Project, a garden for at-risk homeless youth in New Mexico;
- Notes from the 2007 HTD PPN Field Session, in which newsletter editor Sally Shute interviews event organizers Jack Carman and P. Annie Kirk;
- Book review of Susan Rodiek and Benyamin Schwarz’s new book The Role of the Outdoors in Residential Environments for the Aging;
- An article on Sharon’s Sensory Garden, a garden for the visually and physically impaired in Mendon, NY;
- An article about the Firefighters Tree Living Memorial at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.