At our design studio, connecting people and nature forms the core of our values manifesto: making gardens of all sizes and locations which can be enjoyed by everyone. At RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2021, we brought a pocket park to the show – an exploration of what publicly shared garden spaces mean. In 2023, we continued this strand of connectivity and accessibility with our Best in Show garden for Horatio’s Garden.
You may also like
- A guide to Horatio's Garden from RHS Chelsea 2023
- Talking Gardens podcast with Charlotte Harris
- Meet Olivia Chapple, co-founder of Horatio's Garden
- Watch Charlotte Harris on her 100 best plants
The garden was actually just stopping briefly at Chelsea en route to its legacy home at one of the largest NHS spinal injury centres in the country, at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield. As you read this, the works for a garden eight times the size of the Chelsea version are well underway, replacing a car park with a healing sanctuary of green. It is due to open in spring 2025 for patients, their friends and family, and the NHS staff who care for them.
There’s been much written about the power of gardens and green spaces – most recently in Sue Stuart-Smith’s seminal book The Well Gardened Mind. You may not think accessibility is something you need right now, but this will change over time – for you or for those you love. What’s more, whether in a wheelchair, using a walking frame, having a broken leg or simply getting small children around, more inclusive places are better for all of us.
Well-crafted views and experiences of planting throughout the garden are critical; they invite us to come into the garden on a difficult day, or to act as rehabilitation goals
In her brilliant book, What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World, Sara Hendren challenges us to step away from ideas of ‘normalcy’ and instead to think about how good design can empower and reimagine. ‘Ability and disability may be in part about the physical state of the body,’ Hendren writes, ‘but they are also produced by the relative flexibility or rigidity of the built world.’ If we think differently about the details of our gardens, it has the power to make places that all of us can enjoy and be enriched by.
When Horatio’s Garden asked our design studio to create an accessible garden at Northern General Hospital’s spinal injury centre, they challenged us to see the requirements of patients with spinal injuries in beds or wheelchairs as a design opportunity, not a limitation.
Those using the garden will always be the best people to steer how it should work for them. Whether it’s a garden for yourself, a place where you’re helping a friend, or a green space for an organisation, you will need to do lots of listening and asking questions. Our ongoing learning journey with Horatio’s Garden, since 2021, has included hundreds of patients, their loved ones, NHS staff, head gardeners and volunteers who have shared what makes a garden work best for them, and that in turn has directly driven the design and its details.
Paths and wayfinding
Patients told us that paths are easiest to navigate in wheelchairs or beds when they are serpentine with no sharp angles or corners. At Horatio’s Garden Sheffield & East, the curvilinear paths are minimum of 1.5m wide to allow for a wheelchair with one person walking alongside, and these ebb and flow into wider spaces to allow for passing. In a domestic garden, paths should be at least 1.2m wide, with a turning circle of 2.4m.
These winding, explorative paths contrast with the requirements for gardeners with visual impairments, where a simpler geometric grid may be more suitable – underscoring the importance of really understanding who is using the garden.
By comparison, people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia can find a garden clearer to discern and safer to be in when there are visible boundaries, markers and paths that are very simple loops or figures of eight. ‘Waymarkers’ or features in the garden, such as structures, seating or sculpture, help legibility, and thus increase the sense of safety, comfort and enjoyment. Sensory landmarks around the garden are also useful devices for people with visual impairments, such as the sound of water or the change in textures from a paving finish to the crunch of gravel.
Considering surfaces
Accessible gardens should also have stable, safe, glare-free surfaces. In Horatio’s Gardens, these are joint-free and thus pain-free, with little or no gradient for those learning to use a wheelchair. A resin-bound gravel creates a smooth, permeable and durable surface that doesn’t shift as standard gravel does. Where a poured surface can’t be used, larger paving units with a good grip rating can be an option, with meticulous attention to laying, with flush joints to avoid trips and with joint widths no wider than 5mm.
Gravel is a low-cost alternative but can be hard for wheels to move on. Alternatively, consider using hoggin or self-binding gravel, which are more stable due to the higher content of finer particles. In time, however, they can rut and may need improving on a semi-regular basis. Making pathway edges more legible – for wheelchair users or people with visual impairment, for example – is worth consideration.
Spaces to rest
As in every garden, creating a balance of places for shared and more private moments to linger is key. In an adaptive garden, consider how seating can be positioned at easy distances, to give regular rest and contemplation spots. Seating places feel most comfortable and give that instinctive sense of safety when we have a good prospect and can see what’s around. At the same time, they need to create a sense of refuge, with something solid behind. At Horatio’s Garden Sheffield & East, we are planting shrubs and trees behind seating spaces, with lower, scented, tactile species at the sides as an immersive embrace.
Shade is critical. Bodily temperature regulation issues are experienced by many people, not just those with spinal injuries, and people with dementia can be at a higher risk from sun exposure. At the first Horatio’s Garden in Salisbury, designed by Cleve West, an apple tree archway of successional English varieties creates a beautifully cool, green tunnel, perfect for sheltering from the sun. The design also allows for easy picking of apples from a wheelchair or hospital bed.
Water features should be easy to get close to and touch, and, similarly, raised containers provide alternative planting options and allow everyone to get up close.
Planting for people
Our design for the Sheffield site includes a high proportion of trees, which deliver cooling and dappled light. They reduce the scale of the hospital buildings on two sides, in an effort to help patients shift from the sterile-feeling environment of the ward indoors to the natural and transportative atmosphere of the garden. Moreover, trees deliver visible planting for many different ways of seeing, including looking at
the canopy above from a hospital bed.
Layered, multi-sensory planting will help create and satisfy different viewpoints and interactions. Well-crafted views and experiences of planting throughout the garden are critical; they invite us to come into the garden on a difficult day, or even to act as goals during rehabilitation. A gentle convex topsoil ‘belly’ is a simple and effective trick to make planting feel more immersive and dynamic.
also reduce the scale of buildings to help patients transition more easily to the natural environment of the garden, and even provide a canopy ‘garden’ for them to look down on from upper-floor wards. © Eva Nemeth
Design plan for an accessible garden design
The garden has more than one entrance and is multi-routed. Ramps handle unavoidable changes in levels.
Trees regulate temperature and provide cooling, as well as a green canopy to view looking up from a bed in the garden or out of a window.
Rest opportunities at easy intervals. Structural planting to the rear provides prospect and refuge, with scented planting to the sides.
Planting beds with contoured ‘bellies’ allow for immersion at wheelchair or bed height.
Curvilinear pathways are simpler to navigate in a wheelchair or bed.
Flexible mixed and moveable seating for a range of group sizes, or for quiet time.
A large water table is interactive, and brings movement, sound and wildlife to the garden.
Multi-sensory, multi-layered and multi-season planting for patients who may be resident in the hospital for months.
Raised beds at wheelchair and bed height.
Case study for an accessible garden
At Wraxall Yard’s accessible self-catered holiday accommodation in Dorset, Hortus Collective designed the gardens for people with disabilities, their families and friends
“This is a place where you can bring every member of the family to stay,” says Mark Rogers of Hortus Collective, “and while it enables people of different mobilities, it is a space for everyone. We’ve tried to omit visual cues such as handrails wherever possible.”
Raised planting at seating height Repurposed agricultural troughs, reclaimed from the site itself, are elevated slightly on blocks and positioned close to the doors of each apartment for easy herb picking, or weeding and planting from a seat or wheelchair.
Accessible pathways The accessible ethos is apparent from the moment you arrive: the parking is well considered, with large spaces of a minimum of 2.4m wide, accessed by a solid surface ‘aisle’ of 1.2m cement-free brushed concrete. Paths leading from there towards the central courtyard take in existing contours, and gently ramp with a 1:21 gradient – well in line with most guidelines of 1:20, and 1:12 as the absolute maximum acceptable – showing how thoughtful design can work with the conditions of a site. Sinuous concrete paths (pictured) lead up to the doors.
Considerate lighting Lighting – essential for navigation – was carefully selected and positioned with the fittings pointing downwards to ensure glare guarding.