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For Hayleigh Austin-Richards, it is a place to have a cry, breathe fresh air and remind herself there is something magical about butterflies. As often as she can, the ward manager of Chapel Allerton’s stroke rehabilitation unit in Leeds visits the hospital’s “Garden for Recovery”, originally created for the Chelsea Flower Show and installed last summer.
Austin-Richards’s job can be hectic and tough, and she sees people going through some of the worst moments of their lives. The garden is a refuge: “It’s quiet. The way it’s designed, it brings you in and shelters you in it. You feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere,” she said.
“Having a few minutes or half an hour out there, in nature, sometimes in the sunshine – it helps. You decompress, and go back to work with renewed energy and a fresh set of eyes, feeling more cheerful and more focused.”
With stress among NHS staff at record levels, and as the awareness of the psychological benefits of being in nature increases, growing numbers of NHS hospital trusts are noticing the untapped potential of their outdoor spaces – and turning to gardeners for help. In the past 10 months alone, 16 NHS hospitals, GPs and other healthcare settings have contacted the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to ask for help creating “wellbeing gardens” for staff, patients and visitors.
These gardens are designed to stimulate the senses and provide “hopeful” places to rest and process emotions, according to RHS wellbeing garden programme manager Victoria Shearing.
Instead of viewing their outdoor spaces as areas to pass through or look out on, “hospitals are starting to see these spaces as offering real health and wellbeing benefits for their staff and visitors,” she said. “They’ve seen them work for patients in clinical settings like Horatio’s Garden [at the National Spinal Injuries Centre] and Maggie’s [specialist cancer centres].”
Dame Linda Pollard, chair of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said indoor spaces where staff can find peace and quiet on a busy, urban hospital site are often very limited: “Staff rooms are over-populated and they’re not an environment that helps you de-stress and clear your head.” Pollard has invited the RHS to open a wellbeing garden at St James’s University hospital, Leeds, in September.
The garden is part of a national network of wellbeing gardens that the RHS is creating across England for NHS staff and patients as it works to design an evidence-based blueprint for wellbeing gardens due to be completed this year.
Pollard thinks there are “unquestionably” benefits to be had from installing wellbeing gardens. “We’ve got a real mental health issue nationally,” she said. “The NHS is a stressful environment to be in, regardless of what job you do. It’s an awful lot of pressure and it got worse over Covid.”
Staff shortages and long waiting-list backlogs are only adding to this pressure. “We have to look after our staff. The NHS is made up not only of the people we serve but the people who work within it, and if we forget that, we won’t have an NHS.”
The first garden in the RHS scheme opened in 2022 at University hospital Lewisham, where 70% of staff surveyed by the RHS have since reported that the garden improved their wellbeing and 81% noted a positive impact on workplace morale. Another garden opened last summer at Colchester hospital and one is planned in greater Manchester.
All the gardens so far have been designed by the BBC Gardeners’ World presenter Adam Frost. “In a hospital environment, you can experience every human emotion possible – whether that’s anger, tears or a moment of joy,” said Frost. “Gardens give us space. If you watch a bird land on a tree or a bee collect pollen, that’s a moment where you’re not then thinking about something else.”
As well as offering sheltered places to sit and wheelchair-accessible paths, all of the wellbeing gardens Frost has designed have layers of planting, from trees and shrubs to herbaceous plants and bulbs: “There’s huge diversity in there that will carry people through the season.
“Ultimately, gardens are about moments – and moments are created by something new appearing on a certain day and the wildlife that comes into the garden,” Frost said.
When Austin-Richards manages to take a break in the garden, she feels the benefits for hours. “I definitely feel better at the end of the day, when I’m coming home. It is also used every single day by our patients for therapy sessions.”
Some of her patients have been stuck in a clinical environment for months. “For them to feel, even for a few minutes, that they’re not in a hospital – it makes a massive difference to them.”
