Rachel Freeman

I am a Lecturer in Horticulture here at Technological University Dublin and one a small number of L9 qualified Social and Therapeutic Horticulture Practitioners in Ireland. As a founding member of the Irish SCTH Practitioners Network, I am passionate about the need to network and meet practitioners to remain current in my teaching and disseminate research to practitioners. In 2019 I, together with the network, organised the first Irish STH Symposium, held on the Blanchardstown campus. I love nature and the beauty of the natural landscape is where I live to be; coming from a business and entrepreneurial Mayo family, I spent my early career working in in both Landscape and horticulture retail. In addition, I spent many years with Irish Probation and Welfare Sector utilizing horticulture and the outdoors while teaching young offenders. This is where the therapeutic benefits of horticulture activities and time spent in nature, were openly evident to me. In education, I enjoy creative, entrepreneurial, and experiential activities in my teaching and assessment work with students. A career highlight was completing a PG Diploma in 2020 in Entrepreneurial Education with UCD. In my current teaching, civic engagement activities within the university give me hands on opportunities to collaborate on horticulture projects with students and local communities. Several local community gardens have been created by my students working in conjunction with local community volunteers. I write for Horticulture Connected an Irish trade magazine and support the forest planting movement Stepping Stones Forest (SSF) with horticultural advice (http://www.steppingstoneforests.org/). SSF have planted more than 25 300sqm forests in schools and parks(and TU Dublin campuses) using volunteers, right across Dublin with sponsorship from Amazon and Google, and I am proud to have been part of that.

Horticulture, Social and therapeutic Horticulture