Bringing the Hospice UK Garden of Compassion to life at Hortus Loci

As the Hospice UK team gathers at Hortus Loci in Hampshire, it couldn’t feel further away from the hot, sunny climes of show week at RHS Chelsea that we’re all collectively imagining in a few months’ time. 

The temperature is a just a few degrees above  freezing, and everyone – including the garden’s designer, Tom Hoblyn, and landscaping company boss, Peter Harket – are layered up. And they still look very cold.

“It’s not something we’ve ever done before for one of our RHS Chelsea gardens,” says Tom, “but this year we felt like we needed to properly plot it out and get our heads around how all the individual elements will sit together. It’ll really help us iron out any issues before we get into the build.”

There are a few reasons why Tom might say this. The award-winning designer of the Hospice UK Garden of Compassion has envisioned a series of interconnecting rooms which will be accessible to hospice patients, and that means the route requires careful plotting and testing to make sure that a hospice bed can fit through the spaces. 

It’s also why there is palliative care expert on-site today, who is giving Tom and his team some guidance around how manoeuvring a hospice bed around the garden would work in practice.

We plod carefully through the thick mud en-route to the garden build site – in steel toe-capped boots due to the sheer amount of very heavy boulders and machinery that are moving around. 

We’re met with the sight of an animated garden designer who is very much in his element. For all the many months of researching, planning, seed-collecting and growing on, to choosing the type of render for a wall divider, and topographical surveying, Tom Hoblyn is about as excited as anyone can get on a freezing cold February afternoon to see the Garden of Compassion taking its first steps towards being something tangible. 

And we are too, having seen the CAD drawings, Tom’s watercolours, illustrations and mood boards. An aura of quiet wonderment ripples through the group at what we see.

It may be cold and muddy, but it’s delightful to see the hard landscaping elements of the build being put into place. The huge centrepiece – a magnificent Scots Pine –  gently ripples in the February sunshine, and towers carefully over the garden. 

The area has been mapped out with spray paint, with markers for the dry stone walling (in the process of being constructed), the boulders from Durham (the garden will relocate to St Cuthbert's Hospice after RHS Chelsea) - with specifications on the exact angle they need to be placed in - plus various trees to frame the space, and where the artisan-crafted benches will go. 

The dry stone wallers – Tom and Liam – are testing out various different sizes and shapes of stone, and each piece they lay is thoroughly interrogated.

Beyond, there is an energetic discussion taking place between Tom and his planting team as to whether they’ll be turning some of the valerian pots, currently growing in the nursery, on their sides, so that they can be planted into the walling already facing towards the sun.

After a walkthrough of the garden’s footprint, Tom leads us to a separate area where there is a one metre wide strip of rendered wall. This beautifully textured vertical panel is the product of a specialist stonemason, Guy, who talks us through the composition and concept behind his work. 

As part of months of research and development, Guy and Tom have produced a wall inspired by the colours of the Olive Houses in Mallorca, intentionally textured unevenly to represent natural weathering, and gradating amounts of pigment in the render mixture from top to bottom. 

Every tiny detail has been pondered over, and tested repeatedly until it is deemed perfect. That thoroughness and perfectionism extends even to the spout of the water feature, which Tom explains he made 15 of until he got the right size and shape.

Tom and his planting team are growing some of the thousands of plants, and various trees, in the nursery at Hortus Loci. We're treated by Tom to a tour of the greenhouses to see how they're getting on.

It's not easy to produce a fully fledged Mediterranean garden in the UK by the middle of May, and Tom remarks that they have to try and trick nature into believing it's not the British winter. For example, the beautiful fig tree currently on the plotted out garden doesn't like cold weather, so after the footprint has been finished, it'll be taken straight back to the greenhouse to protect it from the cold - and encourage stimulation of abundant leaf-growing. Tom comments that during show week at RHS Chelsea, you'll be able to smell the fig tree's sweet scent 'from miles away.'

In several of the nursery's greenhouses, rows and rows of carefully labelled seedlings are laid out. Some of these are plants never seen before at RHS Chelsea, and Tom - with a glint in his eye - asks us to stop filming for fear of the secret getting out. He has personally collected wildflower seeds from Spain and Greece last year in order to grow them on for The Garden of Compassion (with official permission from the relevant authorities of course). 

His data-driven approach to soil type and pH levels means that everything we see in the nursery is growing beautifully: he has been successful in tricking nature.

You might see coverage of RHS Chelsea on the BBC in May (or in person if you’re fortunate enough to get a ticket), and appreciate the beauty of the end product. But what you don’t see on TV, and what is clear about our visit to Hortus Loci, is the sheer amount of sustained effort, by so many people for so long, that goes into the creation of a RHS Chelsea show garden. 

That Tom has been on site in freezing temperatures all week to work so closely with his landscaping and planting teams is a testament to his thoughtful determination. His end goal, in what will be his final RHS Chelsea garden, is to be a huge success not as a swansong for his glittering RHS career, but for hospices around the UK. 

He plans to do that by making the Hospice UK Garden of Compassion the embodiment of what makes their gardens so vitally important to patients, their families and staff by connecting and grounding them in Mother Nature. We already know that he will achieve something extraordinary on behalf of hospices around the UK at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show.