A CHARITY that created a bespoke garden at Gobowen’s Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital has won the Best Show Garden award at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show.

The ‘adaptive’ garden for disabled patients with spinal injuries was created by charity Horatio's Garden.

Designers Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg for the charity which has created natural external landscapes at NHS spinal injury centres up and down the country.

Border Counties Advertizer: Queen Camilla at Horatio's Garden.Queen Camilla at Horatio's Garden. (Image: PA Images.)

The garden will go to one such spinal injuries centre in Sheffield after the Chelsea Show and will be made eight times larger.

Ms Harris said: “If you’ve had a spinal injury you’re often in bed in a ward for many months at a time, and if you think about what you’re looking at, it’s usually a very unattractive hospital ceiling.

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“Everywhere inside the hospital is sterile, bleeps and buttons, wiped clean, and actually getting people out, looking at canopies, thinking about the garden from different levels, whether it’s a bit lower or looking up.

Border Counties Advertizer: The garden at Chelsea. The garden at Chelsea. (Image: PA Images.)

“There are different level windows in the garden room, the planting has been designed, and the height of the water table has been designed, specifically with that in mind.”

The garden features cairns and a water feature set at a wheelchair-user’s eye level and is on a cement-free terrazzo-style path, without any bumps or gradient.

Meanwhile, the garden room is made with natural materials like timber and sequoia shingles to be as far removed from a hospital ward as possible.

The walls are covered with 1,200 thumbprints of everyone who was involved in the garden’s creation, from patients to NHS staff to RHS judges.

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Large wheeled plant plots slide along the perfectly-smooth and flat path, designed to accommodate positioning beds or chairs in areas where patients like to be.

Ms Harris said: “It’s not only patient friendly but it’s environmentally friendly. This is cement-free, so just this amount of paving has saved the equivalent carbon of three return flights to New York.”

Creating nature-friendly gardens was a theme among other gardeners and growers, with the Royal Entomological Society garden focusing on the role of insects and many designers including drought-resistant plants as well as wildflowers native to the UK.

The RJAH Horatio’s Garden space was officially opened in Gobowen in 2019 and was designed by Bunny Guinness in 2017.

It provides space for spinal patients at the Orthopaedic Hospital as they recover.

Border Counties Advertizer: Horatio's Garden at the RJAH. Horatio's Garden at the RJAH. (Image: Horatio's Garden.)