Semple Begg’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2023 Gold Medal winning show garden, the Teapot Trust Elsewhere Garden was designed for children’s art therapy charity Teapot Trust and generously funded by Project Giving Back .
The Elsewhere Garden demonstrated how art therapy helps children by taking them Elsewhere, where, with support and imagination, they find the creativity to express and overcome their fears about their treatment.
Inspired by themes and imagery of children’s culture. We travelled to Wonka’s factory, to Oz and Wonderland where the inner world of a child’s anxiety is expressed as an outer wonderland and the natural world behaves in strange, unexpected ways.
In this magical place, anxiety was voiced through unusual shape and form. Two Picea abies ‘Inversa’ stood guard over a cool deep pond, their unusual creature-like form giving them strong character, trees as a child might imagine them. Perhaps coming to life when the lights go out, snuffling through the ferns and stooping to drink from the pond.
More joyful moments in a child’s art therapy experience were expressed in the ‘Dolly Mixture’ stream of Candelabra primula. Their bright pops of colourshimmering in the spray from the water balance sculptures with their playful spouts and dazzling gongs.
The Elsewhere Garden sought to transport visitors to their own ‘elsewhere,’ to stimulate their imaginations, to remind them what it is to be a child, to reawken ways of seeing and understanding. With the intention of giving an experience parallel to the process of art therapy.
Visitors were encouraged to engage with the hidden world of the garden via our interactive soundscape. Accessed through headphones, the soundscapes mixed the familiar with the strange and uncanny. Talking into the head of a watering can caused the grasses to ‘dance’ to the sound of each voice and stroking the leaves of a primula, wired to ECG pads allowed visitors to ‘hear’ the plant.
Taking a garden to Chelsea is an enormous undertaking for a charity, especially a small charity like Teapot Trust. We felt a deep responsibility to create a garden that not only communicated the power of art therapy to transform young lives but also to encourage visitor engagement, to stimulate questions, laughter and conversation.
The interactive nature of the soundscape and the inclusion of artworks by children made it easier for the charity volunteers to engage the public, to draw a link between the show garden and the vital work they do.
Semple Begg garden design are delighted to say that in this respect the garden was an enormous success, Teapot Trust reported an incredible public response to the show garden during Chelsea week, a 300-400% rise in online engagement, national press, TV and media coverage beyond their expectations and are seeking to expand their service nationally to help fulfil their aim that any child, anywhere in the UK can access their service.
Thanks to the support of Project Giving Back and NHS Greater Glasgow the Elsewhere Garden legacy will live on at the Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow. All our wonderful trees, plants and shrubs have been carefully relocated to the much larger, open and sunny site.
Due to open in Spring 2024 the garden will be used for outdoor art therapy and all patients, staff and visitors will be welcome.
