Rapper Professor Green will officially open the RHS Feel Good Garden, which promotes gardening for health, happiness and wellbeing, at the 2018 RHS Chelsea Flower Show on the preview day next Monday (21 May).
Designed by Matt Keightley, twice-winner of the RHS/BBC People’s Choice Award at Chelsea, the garden provides a contemporary and therapeutic space that focuses on the positive impact that gardens and gardening can have on health.
The garden will be re-builty after the show at Camden and Islington (C&I) NHS Foundation Trust, which provides care and treatment to vulnerable adults in a built-up part of London where green space is limited. The Trust will receive the garden to mark the NHS’s 70th birthday.
Professor Green, who has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of his adult life, said: “I know only too well how hard and hopeless it can feel when you suffer from anxiety and depression. I’m opening this garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show because if being out in a garden helps people feel better or takes their mind off their worries, then that has to be a good thing.
“I think the Chelsea garden living on at the Camden and Islington mental health trust is a great project that will be of real benefit to both the patients, and also the staff who work there. I love my own garden and the more time people spend close to nature, away from phones and general pressure of life the better we’ll all feel.”
The garden will at C&I will be re-created in an outdoor space that is currently underused and lacks opportunities for stimulation.