Linklaters Garden for Maggie’s

The “Linklaters Garden for Maggie’s” at RHS Chelsea was inspired by the progressive vision of the late Maggie Keswick Jencks, who understood the need for people with cancer to have access to restorative, tranquil green spaces away from more clinical hospital environments.

Award-winning garden designer Darren Hawkes will create a peaceful, secret garden, enveloped in a three-metre high hornbeam hedge, that can be glimpsed through beautifully crafted wooden gates and wide slots in the perimeter hedge, before being fully revealed from a uniquely elevated position at the back of the site. The encircled garden will provide an exciting, unconventional space, one that is tranquil, yet engaging.

A two-metre wide maze-like path will run alongside and behind the garden giving visitors the opportunity to walk within the garden boundary looking into the garden below. 

Several of the garden’s key features will come from a single cuboid of basalt concrete, broken apart to form concrete paving, benches, a garden building and a water feature, that can be reassembled as a single mass.  These elements will demonstrate how life can be put back together again when it has been blown apart following a diagnosis of cancer.

The streamline use of a single landscape material in the garden has been designed to maintain the feeling of serenity in the garden and to reflect the same economy of resources that is apparent at the 19 existing Maggie’s Centres around the country.  The concrete will be treated with bespoke finishes throughout the garden with crushed concrete at ground level complimenting highly polished and acid-etched features for the concrete building, benches and water feature.

Legacy Garden
Beyond the Show, plants and other elements of the Chelsea garden will be used to create a garden for the new Maggie’s Centre currently under construction at London’s Barts Hospital. The new garden, which has also been designed by Darren Hawkes, will have the same sense of enclosure and stillness as the Chelsea garden and provide a lasting legacy for the Charity when it opens later this year.

Planting
The delicate, feminine planting will juxtapose with the harsh brutality of the concrete elements and bring a layer of scent and serenity to the garden. Under the canopy of a huge Amalanchier will nestle Hostas, Rodgersias, Thalictrum and Peonies.  In addition, the open spaces will be filled with Roses, Box, Elder and Iris.  The planting palette is soft and fragile with shades of pink set against the lavender and grey-green hues of the foliage.

Plant list

Perennials

Ferns

Trees & Shrubs

Roses

Annuals & Bulbs