Bowles & Wyer wins SGD Award for NHS 70 Garden
Landscape design company and BALI Registered Contractor Bowles & Wyer has won the Healing, Learning and Community Award at the Society Garden Designers Awards 2020 for its NHS 70 Garden at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge - a restorative garden designed to provide a calm space for patients and their families.
Created to encourage visitors to slow down and spend more time looking, touching and interacting with the natural environment in order to reap the restorative benefits of being outdoors, the winning garden features a meandering path at its centre, with a series of timber posts framing it at different heights and angles, so that new aspects of the space open up as they make their way through. The judges called it
'a lovely community garden providing a calm, embracing feel which works fantastically well for the hospital.'
The planting, which the judges said 'works extremely well providing a strong rhythm to soften the timber fins' is designed to provide a lush and exuberant feeling, reflecting the style of a naturalistic woodland with coppiced hazel, hornbeam hedging and shade-loving plants, to allow visitors to feel removed from the clinical environment of the hospital. Fresh green colours and a rich tapestry of textures, shapes and leaf forms add to the restorative effect of the space.
John Wyer, Chief Executive at Bowles & Wyer, said:
“We're absolutely thrilled to have won the Healing, Learning or Community Award at the SGD Awards 2020 and in particular to have been recognised for the NHS 70 garden which is a favourite project for us. It epitomises the values of our business – nurturing talent, working with deserving causes, developing client loyalty and recycling and reducing waste. Seeing the transformation of the space and the impact it has had on the people who see it and use it every day has been wonderful. To be recognised by the SGD is testament to the talent and hard work that went in to creating it."
Originally designed as a show garden for the RHS Tatton Flower Show by junior designer Max Harriman, Bowles & Wyer then worked with Max to adapt the design before relocating it to Addenbrooke's Hospital in 2018. It is the fifth garden designed by Bowles & Wyer for the Cambridge University Hospitals.
The SGD Awards, which are organised by the Society of Garden Designers, are the most sought after awards in the industry and recognise designers and landscapers who demonstrate exceptionally high standards of professionalism and skill in their industry.