The Hospitalfield garden at RHS Chelsea
I am writing this post on Thursday evening, from the train, on my return journey from Dundee and Arbroath. Can I just say that the East coast train takes you past some stunning scenery!
I think I have mentioned before that I love recording and the opportunity to go and meet people is always special.
Lucy’s dog
I’m not sure that Lucy Byatt’s dog was impressed by my line of questions but seemed very comfortable, settled on my work bag, as she and I chatted! Lucy is the Director at Hospitalfield a charity in Arbroath that offers residencies for artists, enabling them to work and relax in the beautiful house and surroundings. The planting in the walled garden was created by Nigel Dunnett and he is the designer who has created the Hospitalfield garden for RHS Chelsea this year. It has been funded by Project Giving Back. It draws inspiration from the local coastline which you see close-up as you travel on the train from Dundee to Arbroath. If you follow Nigel Dunnett on Instagram you can see images of the build which is currently going on.
Once the show is over, the garden will be packed up on lorries, and transported back to Arbroath where it will find a new home at Ladyloan Primary school. I sat in the playground with Rachel David, the inspiring teacher who is going to incorporate this new garden into the pupils’ school lives and learning. Currently the site is a patch of grass with an old hen coop and some smallish apple trees, a bug hotel and small pond. But after the summer there will be sand dunes!
As part of the process of preparing the children for the new garden, Rachel set them the task of researching coastal erosion which is a very real threat when your school is literally one road away from the sea. Rachel suspects they may be one of the closest schools, to the sea, in the country. She says the children were quite frightened to learn that in 20 years time the golf course up the road might have disappeared. Sobering when you think a primary age child will be just 25 when that happens. In 50 years the erosion could reach into Arbroath itself. So this is a very real problem that will impact the lives of the children and their families and will need solutions.
Rachel is passionate about the need to bring art and creativity into the children’s curriculum and this garden with a small artists bothy, representing the ethos at Hospitalfield, will enable her and other staff, to build more opportunities for outside learning into the children’s lessons.
I am excited to see this garden in situ at Chelsea next week but even more excited to see how it settles back into its new home in the months to come. The episode I have recorded over the past couple of days, will go out next Tuesday and I do hope that if you are lucky enough to go to Chelsea this year or are watching the television coverage, you will look out for this garden.
I also visited a new exhibition at the V&A in Dundee called Garden Futures:Designing with Nature. It opens on Saturday and runs till the 25th January 2026 and I will return to this in a future post and episode. It is celebrating the role that gardens play in all of our lives. I just wanted to mention here, that as I rounded a corner, I came face to face with 2 of Lally Snow’s images from her book War Gardens. If you haven’t heard Lally talk about her work, then you can do so here, when she was in conversation with Anya from Kyiv about how people manage to keep gardening even in the midst of war. The Garden Futures exhibition is fascinating and full of plant stories.
Oh and finally I just had to share that I sat next to Kate on the journey from Edinburgh to Dundee on Wednesday. Kate is a gardener who was on her way to the botanical gardens in St Andrews via the Cambo gardens in Fife and she’s a listener to the podcast! I can’t tell you how exciting it is to just bump into someone who says “I know Our Plant Stories”. We had a lovely chat. So please do keep spreading the word about the podcast to gardening (and non gardening friends) because word of mouth is a good way to spread a podcast when you don’t have a marketing budget!
Have a lovely weekend
Sally
x
ps I am currently writing this year’s entry to the Independent Podcast Awards. Being a finalist in the competition last year was an amazing opportunity, just meeting other small podcasters and learning from them was brilliant. The forms ask for testimonials from listeners. So you don’t have to write it here you could email me sally@ourplantstories.com but if just a couple of you could tell me what you like about listening to the podcast it would very helpful for the entry form!