British rapper, singer and songwriter Professor Green will officially open the RHS Feel Good Garden, which promotes gardening for health, happiness and wellbeing, at the 2018 RHS Chelsea Flower Show on the preview day, Monday 21 May.
Designed by twice-winner of the RHS/BBC People’s Choice Award at the world’s most famous gardening event, Matt Keightley, the RHS Feel Good Garden provides a contemporary and therapeutic space that focusses on the positive impact that gardens and gardening can have on our health.
Following an RHS competition for NHS mental health trusts to win the RHS Feel Good Garden, after the show it will live on at Camden and Islington (C&I) NHS Foundation Trust, which provides care and treatment to vulnerable adults in a built-up part of London where green space is limited. The Trust will receive the garden to mark the NHS’s 70th Birthday.
Professor Green will open the RHS Feel Good Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show to help promote how gardens and gardening can have a positive impact on mental health and how you feel.
Professor Green, who has struggled with anxiety and depression for much of his adult life, said: “I know only too well how hard and hopeless it can feel when you suffer from anxiety and depression. I’m opening this garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show because if being out in a garden helps people feel better or takes their mind off their worries, then that has to be a good thing.
“I think the Chelsea garden living on at the Camden and Islington mental health trust is a great project that will be of real benefit to both the patients, and also the staff who work there. I love my own garden and the more time people spend close to nature, away from phones and general pressure of life the better we’ll all feel.”
The RHS Feel Good Garden will go to C&I in June and be re-created in an outdoor space that is currently underused and lacks opportunities for stimulation.