Next week 2,000 of these lovely @the_rhs Chelsea Flower Show plants (grown organically by @hortusloci for the @YeoValley show garden) are going to be donated to five London hospitals. After the show was cancelled this year we needed to find a home for the plants and didn’t want them to go to waste. Next Tuesday is the exact day that the build would have been getting underway. I have been coordinating with @yeovalley @hortusloci and contacts at Guy’s & St Thomas’ (the same hospital, that recently treated the prime minister for coronavirus), St George’s Hospital Tooting, and Kingston Hospital to arrange the donations. The horticultural industry has been hit hard by the cancellation of the Chelsea Flower Show and the lockdown measures. There have been reports of thousands of plants going to waste as no one can purchase them. We wanted to take a more proactive approach and gift the plants to a good cause as a show of support for the NHS. We hope that the plants will brighten up the hospital grounds and provide a small boost to help NHS staff and patients through these incredibly trying times. I will be at St George’s on Tuesday morning, helping to off-load the plants and then working with the gardening team to find suitable locations for the plants. This will all be done observing strict social-distancing measures. St Georges is local to me – as I live in South West London, so I am treating the excursion as my daily exercise. I am really looking forward to getting them there and planting them out. The cancellation of Chelsea has left a huge hole for many in the industry, so I would like to thank Yeo Valley for the kind donation and for letting us do something worthwhile with the plants. The larger specimens and trees will all go to the @yeovalleyorganicgarden for safe storage – hopefully for use at CFS 2021! Fingers crossed we can beat this virus before then. •
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#rhschelsea #supportthenhs #nhs #nhsheroes #hope #lockdown #coronavirus #garden #gardendesign #planting #plants #horticulture #flowers #greening #london
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