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Friday 11 November 2016

The healing power of Great Ormond Street's new garden

Trees are good for our health:
Futures Forum: Hug a tree > it's good for you
Futures Forum: Take a walk in the forest
Futures Forum: Green cities: Good health

Especially if we're ill:
Futures Forum: The green prescription: 'forget your tablets and get moving'
Futures Forum: The clinical benefits of trees
Futures Forum: Nature.Health.Design. Bringing nature nearer to the patient
Futures Forum: Healing by Design
Futures Forum: Healing gardens

There are some very good projects out there:
Futures Forum: Landscaping for Health: inspiring projects in the south-west

The latest is happening in London:

The healing power of Great Ormond Street's new garden
Charlotte Lytton 4 NOVEMBER 2016 


The new garden at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London
For gardeners, it’s a hardy perennial – what to do with an exposed spot that’s open to the elements but gets precious little direct sunlight.
While the green-fingered have been planting winter bulbs in their borders, Chris Beardshaw – best known for his design prowess on Gardeners’ World – has been on a once-abandoned flat roof in Bloomsbury, central London, putting finishing touches to his bold new visitors garden at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).
With the help of volunteers at the children’s hospital as well as the team from BBC One makeover series DIY SOS, Beardshaw has turned the spot – a second-floor boilerhouse roof that is surrounded by multi-storey hospital buildings – into a showpiece garden where families and the hospital’s young patients can take time out.



Nick Knowles and the team join forces with two world-famous British institutions, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show, to transport ChrisBeardshaw's gold medal-winning garden across London, crane it over buildings and rebuild it on the hospital's roof.
For hundreds of families, Great Ormond Street Hospital has become a second home. For parents that means being by their child's bedside around the clock, and for children, it results in a constant treadmill of appointments and treatments.
When Rosie was just two years old, her heart began to fail. Great Ormond Street Hospital doctors diagnosed her with restrictive cardiomyopathy, an extremely rare condition affecting just one in a million children, where the heart is too weak to pump blood. Rosie has had an operation to fit a mechanical heart while she awaits a donor, and so she needs intensive around-the-clock care with her mother consistently by her side.
Maisy has epidermolysis bullosa, known as butterfly syndrome, which is an agonising skin disorder where the body lacks the protein it needs to hold the layers of skin together, making it blistered and as fragile as a butterfly's wing. It is such a rare and serious condition that Great Ormond Street Hospital specialists have been looking after her since birth.
Despite the brilliant world-class care, there is nowhere private outside for the families to escape from the constant noise, bustle and bright lights of this huge hospital. The DIY SOS team and Chris Beardshaw have taken on this hugely ambitious build, with tricky logistics and emotional volunteers, in order to offer the many brave families a bespoke and lush calming rooftop garden as a space of welcome respite.


BBC One - DIY SOS, Series 27, DIY SOS at Great Ormond Street Hospital
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