Make your way towards the edge of the Charing Cross Hospital grounds in West London, past the car park and grim NHS buildings, and you will stumble across a secret haven that will shock your senses. You can smell the powerful scent of the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre garden designed by Dan Pearson before you reach it. Enter and, at this time of year, you will be hit by colour.
On the last Wednesday morning of every month, a group of eight or ten volunteers meets here to tend to the garden’s planting, pruning, feeding and weeding, as the seasons demand.
Rosemary Creeser, who heads the group and is a trained garden therapist, describes it as a “therapeutic space” and says that, in the two years since it was created, the garden has had a profound effect on many of those who have toiled in it.
“We have had people helping who are incredibly weak through cancer treatment and many who have no prior experience of gardening,” Creeser says. “Yet they find it inspiring to be outdoors and to focus on the earth and helping things to thrive.” She adds that the garden has prompted career changes in more than one member of the group. “We’ve had people who have found it so immensely beneficial that they have gone off to pursue careers in therapeutic horticulture or landscape gardening,” she says. “It’s about not wallowing in their illness but empowering people to move on with their lives.”
Maureen McCullum, who had breast cancer five years ago, has been a regular volunteer at the Charing Cross garden since it opened. “It’s an escape and it leaves you energised,” she says. “You see changes with the seasons and you see that life goes on.”
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For details of gardening groups at the 15 Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres around the UK, visit maggiescentres.org