Trent Centre for Aging & Society welcomes Australian Researcher for Seminar Series
Dr. Pauline Marsh connects community gardens to end of life care
During Trent’s recent reading break, a large group of students, faculty, and community members, some representing hospice care and community gardening, turned out for a poignant talk by registered nurse and lecturer with the Centre for Rural Health, University of Tasmania, Australia, Dr. Pauline Marsh.
Professor Marsh was welcomed to the Trent campus to share her research project, “Walking Each Other Home: Weaving end-of-life supports into a community garden,” which explores how we might provide better support to individuals at the end of their lives or in bereavement.
Prof. Marsh’s study evolved organically in response to observing community members coming to the Okines Community Garden, located in Tasmania’s Southern Beaches area, when they were in crisis. Some visited at the end of their lives, some after a difficult health diagnosis, and some after losing loved ones. A research question grew out of this observation: are community gardens suitable places to support people in various states of mourning?
Prof. Marsh recalled, “Our project team included a local fibre artist, garden coordinator, grief counsellor and social researcher, all of whom worked collaboratively. Our research was designed to fit with the needs of the community garden. Nothing was artificially structured and imposed by the research team on the space and its users.”
Through various workshops and community events, the team noted that participants wanted to talk about death and dying while in the garden. It was viewed as a low key, safe, and non- confrontational space to do so. It also turned out that a majority of participants were grieving the loss of a partner and they needed to know people cared about their situation and cared about them.
Prof. Marsh’s research indicates a number of ways to strengthen and expand informal palliative supports and point to a therapeutic nexus between gardens, grief and dying.