Gardeners push mental health benefits with flower show offer

GARDENING EXPERTS are teaming up with the NHS to promote the positive impact horticulture can have on people’s mental health.

The Royal Horticultural Society has already pledged its Feel Good Garden at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show will live on at a Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust site in London to help patients and staff there.

Now it has said RHS gardens from the next two years of the show will be given to NHS patients. The announcement comes ahead of the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show, when celebrities and members of the Royal Family will get a preview of the gardens and displays at the central London site before it opens its doors to the public yesterday.

The world-famous show will host a “gardening for health” forum, which will look at ways to promote non-medical treatments such as gardening or getting out into nature, for mental health, also known as “social prescribing”. And British rapper, singer and songwriter Professor Green, who has regularly spoken about struggling with depression, will officially open the RHS Feel Good Garden which looks at how gardening can help with wellbeing and mental health.

Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust won a competition to receive the Feel Good Garden, which was launched to mark the value of gardening to mental health and wellbeing in the 70th anniversary year of the NHS.