A new garden is to be planted around the cancer centre at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in Hertfordshire from this spring. The brainchild of garden writer and broadcaster Matthew Biggs, the planting for the garden is being designed by Millie Souter, head gardener at Tom Stuart-Smith Studio. It will be built by landscaper Mark Gregory of Landform Consultants, who has many gold medal RHS Chelsea Flower Show gardens under his belt, and will be planted and maintained by the Sunnyside Rural Trust. The creation of the garden has been made possible by an anonymous donation of £30,000.
You may also like:
Discover 24 horticultural heroes
Why going outside can boost your health
Why volunteering offers many benefits
Matt had the idea to create a garden while undergoing chemotherapy in the cancer treatment suite at the hospital. “Among its virtues are massive windows at either end of the building,” he explains. “During my treatment, I would always try and get to look at the garden and even sat in it once, but it lacked plants and despite the best efforts of volunteers, offered little inspiration as a healing garden. At the other opposite end is a smaller garden, where Nandina domestica ‘Firepower’ is the only plant of note – I’ve never been so pleased to see it.”
Matt began to mull over how it could be improved. “I’d read that Tom Stuart-Smith [who is based nearby] and his wife Sue, a psychotherapist and author of The Well Gardened Mind were running a community interest company called The Serge Hill Project for Gardening Creativity and Health, and as part of this were working with the Sunnyside Rural Trust, a social enterprise that works with young people and adults with learning disabilities which is also based in Hertfordshire. And then the thought suddenly came to me, wouldn't it be fantastic if we could get this garden improved? The Sunnyside trainees could grow the plants and plant them for the people who are having cancer treatment. I had a lot on my plate, but when you have a thought like that, you can't just let it go.”
Matt secured donations of plants from the Lincolnshire Hardy Plant Society, where he was giving a talk. He’d initially offered to buy £50-worth of plants from their plant stall but ended with much more: “I had the remarkable experience of standing by the school where I was giving the talk watching a drift of people carrying in bags, boxes and trays. I've only got a little car, and I filled the whole thing with plants.”
Matt visited Tom Stuart-Smith’s Plant Library and met his team at Serge Hill near St Albans. The team were keen to help and suggested that Millie Souter, head gardener of Tom Stuart-Smith Studio’s Plant Library, could design the planting for the garden. While there, he also met Keely Siddiqui-Charlick MBE of the Sunnyside Trust, who said that the Trust would help with growing the plants, planting and maintenance. Matt then gave a talk to the Royal Windsor Rose and Horticultural Society, and mentioned his idea, and the Society offered a donation of £500. At the same talk, Matt also bumped into Mark Gregory, who also offered to help restore the garden.
Moved by Matt's story, Alex, Show Director, Royal Windsor Flower Show, called a few months later out of the blue to say that she had received an anonymous donation of £30,000 towards the garden. This changed everything. “It now means we’re now looking at 360° landscaping around the whole cancer centre. There’s little welcoming there at the moment, but the hospital already has a green therapy plan in place. The funding means that we can expand the garden and create a pathway of plants between the garden and an existing meadow.”
‘I’m overwhelmed,” says Matt. “I can’t believe how this project has come together. It’s been awash with generosity, kindness and goodwill, without so many people saying yes and offering to work pro bono or for charity rates, my ideas during chemo would have never got off the ground. I thought that there would be too many problems, it would be far too complex, and I’d would simply run out of energy to make it happen. I just never expected this at all."
With the donation, the blessing of Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith, the planting design by Millie, plants from Sunnyside and landscaping by Mark Gregory, it’s as close as I’m ever going to get to creating a Chelsea Garden,” he jokes. Planting is due to start in spring; Matt hopes that staff and patients should be involved with planting and maintenance, too.