The 'uplifting' best in show Chelsea garden heading to Sheffield's spinal injuries unit

In 24 hours’ time tomorrow evening, designers Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg will find out the result.

It’ll be another milestone on the journey of this “uplifting and beautiful” wheelchair-accessible garden, which was designed as a sanctuary for people with spinal injuries.

After Chelsea it will be reconstructed at the Princess Royal spinal injuries centre in Sheffield, the eighth Horatio’s Garden in the UK.

The charity Horatio’s Garden is named after Horatio Chapple, a 17-year-old killed in 2011 when his camp was attacked by a polar bear whilst on an expedition to Svalbard.

Charlotte said they’d spent a lot of time talking to patients in Sheffield and other units which already have Horatio gardens about what they felt was important in an outdoor space.

"Most patients tell us about the need to escape the clinical environment of the ward, and the need for privacy - to make phone calls, speak to loved ones, or just be by themselves,” said Charlotte.

They made the surfaces completely smooth, with no bumps or dips that can cause pain to patients in beds and wheelchairs and there’s a “warm and welcoming” nest-like garden room – there will be three in Sheffield.

The antithesis to a clinical ward, the garden is planted in a loose, romantic and naturalistic way.

There’s an “exuberant” sunny zone, calmer woodland space and planting round a water feature decorated with cutlery casts inspired by a visit to Kelham Island Museum.

Water flows out from the centre and washes around each piece before dropping down a hidden side.

Archive footage of birch branches being thrown onto hot rolled steel to burn off the impurities inspired the choice of river birch (Betula nigra) in the garden. A sibling stonemason team, Lydia and Bert Noble, from a farm a half an hour’s drive from Sheffield built the stone cairns.

They are a third of their way to the fundraising target for the garden – which will be eight times bigger - but have another £900,000 to raise. "The Sheffield garden will be open in 2024,” said Charlotte. “Everything from Chelsea will be taken to a very kind and brilliant nursery near Chester, the Big Hedge Co, who are looking after everything for free.”

A “gardener’s garden” there’s a Rosa mutabilis which flowers on and off from March, varying from copper to pale pink; Aquilegia chrysantha “Yellow Queen” and amazing thistle-like Cirsium rivulare “Trevor's Blue Wonder”. Their anchor plant is a lovely perennial which blooms in spring and summer with large clusters of tiny, creamy white flowers – the appropriately named Aruncus “Horatio”.