“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
This garden design was created for Whitaker PRTF. This garden was designed and researched by Natasha Donnelly, Ph.D. and psychologist Carol Williams (safety, therapeutic concepts, and other sensory garden research). This design was created with the support of the Clinical Director Ray Newnam and Ben Markoch at NC State, now an alumnus who kindly measured the space and put our ideas into a drawing.
View the original garden design here.
Natasha brought this drawing to her job interview at Juvenile Justice where she introduced the idea and concept as part of her role. She worked on this design for a year at Juvenile Justice until reaching out to the NC State Horticultural Department for advice about plants where she was introduced to Anne Spafford and the NC State horticultural students.
This design has been instrumental in ongoing fundraisers, planning sessions, meetings, and the formation of our nonprofit organization, Trauma Focused Therapeutic Community Gardens – TFTC Gardens. TFTC Gardens provides an avenue for us to share our findings, research, and garden plans with at-risk populations who are interested in investing in gardens throughout the United States and the world.
Our first trauma-focused garden is scheduled to be installed during the summer of 2019 at Cumberland Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Fayetteville, NC.
Photo Credit: Priscilla Du Preez
TFTC Gardens© 