Sustainability, togetherness, and the best of British craftsmanship

The benches are a key part of the Hospice UK Garden of Compassion – fully funded by Project Giving Back – and help create a focal point to the garden’s series of rooms. 

Designer Tom Hoblyn has woven these five sinuous, steam-bent oak benches into the garden’s form, and once in place they’ll meander like a stream through the length of the garden. 

The hugely tactile and ergonomic Together Benches are crafted from a fallen oak, which has been given new life to offer patients, their families and hospice staff a place in which to sit in the Garden of Compassion. Like many hospice’s gardens, places like these help people find moments of togetherness, solace, comfort and respite from the challenges they face.

Whilst most of the elements of the Garden of Compassion are being sourced from the locality of its eventual resting place – St Cuthbert’s Hospice, in Durham – Mark, the craftsperson in charge of making the benches, is on the opposite end of the UK, in Devon. Which is why Hospice UK colleagues have descended on a small workshop in a little village near Okehampton.

Any passers-by of this unassuming garage off a quaint hillside street would be forgiven for being completely unaware of the activity inside – and that a key component of Hospice UK’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden is being crafted there.

The reclaimed oak, after being planed in a larger workshop several miles away, is first steamed in a traditional method: imagine something like a three metre downpipe wrapped in foil cladding, with steam being pumped in from the bottom.

The thin strips of oak are placed into the steamer for around an hour, before being taken out and laid across the supporting brackets of the bench (which themselves are crafted from steam bent pieces of oak and underpinned with shaped steel to give the bench longevity and make it robust enough to weather years of outdoor use).

Steam bending wood is an incredibly simple process, and is rooted in tradition: the low-tech process has been around for over a thousand years. By steaming the oak, it softens the lignin (fibres) within the structure of the wood, making it malleable until it cools and rehardens.

The practice was once a vital industry, and paramount to the production of weapons, tools and water vessels (and in later years, furniture). With the advance of technology the practice has become much less common – and simultaneously, the results much more impressive in today’s modern era of machine built pieces.

Once a strip of oak is removed from the steamer, it’s carefully laid onto the brackets, gently bent into the shape needed, and then held in place with clamps. In between each strip, small ‘biscuits’ are knocked in as spacers, before small copper rivets are hammered in to firmly secure the wood to the frame. 

The copper rivets are a ‘nod to the boat building industry of the north east of England’ – and whilst they start life as nice and shiny, over time they will turn a Verdigris patina that will bleed beautifully into the wood.

Steam bending is a low energy, ecological and economical way of manipulating wood, and doesn't need the expense or drying time of glues to join pieces together. So by creating the Together Benches like this, it aligns with the sustainability theme of the Garden of Compassion – which itself reflects the sustainability of the UK’s hospices.

“One thing that Mark and I discussed right from the beginning,” explains Hoblyn, “and we’ve managed to do it at every step of the garden, is to use reclaimed materials – so our boulders are coming from a field clearance in Durham – right through to this oak here, which is from a wind-felled tree. 

“It’s quite poignant, because it was at the end of its lifecycle, and then we’ve taken it and given it new life by making it into a bench – so you have this whole circle of life thing going on, echoing what happens at a hospice.

Once we’ve seen some of the oak strips being laid into a bench very much in progress, the team heads over to what appears to be a farm, but is in fact a huge wood yard in the countryside.

In this vast warehouse type building, we see three completed Together Benches. It’s a marvel to take in how the concept has manifested into reality, and study the beautiful curves and twists of each piece of oak on the benches – all painstakingly hand laid of course.

Benches which will abut the large boulders on site have undulating finished ends to allow them to neatly integrate with them – others have straight edges where there isn’t a large rock to place next to.

In Tom Hoblyn – whose 2025 RHS Chelsea Flower Show will be his last – it’s obvious that Hospice UK has a designer who takes a hands-on approach to every aspect of his garden. Not content with sitting behind a desk of garden plans and watercolour imaginings, Tom has been getting involved with everything from prototypes of water spouts, hand brushing reclaimed wood for the fencing, and helping put together the benches – despite them being made hundreds of miles away from his home in Suffolk.

The benches’ craftsman, Mark, tells us that each bench takes around one month to create – that’s five months of work for him. Number 4 is nearly finished, which means that there is plenty of time to get the final Together Bench done before the start of the build phase of The Garden of Compassion. That starts in earnest on Tuesday 29 April, just three weeks before RHS Chelsea opens.

“I made the prototype before Christmas,” comments Mark, “so I haven’t been doing much else since then!”

Hoblyn adds, “the original idea, when I was sketching out the garden, was that I had a stream weaving through the garden, and I really wanted that. But thinking about accessibility, it would’ve been a nightmare to do – so I thought, ‘let’s do it another way – let’s represent a stream in another way.’ I kept drawing lots of lines…and eventually I realised that I could do it as a bench instead. As a steam-bent bench we could make it nice and sinuous, and I have dabbled in steam-bending before…”

Hoblyn explains the importance of dividing the bench up and its impact on people being cared for in hospices, and their families.

“I feel like we have this fear of technology – we’ve overwhelmed by it,” Hoblyn explains. “So I’ve gone back to very traditional arts and crafts techniques, and I want to celebrate British craftsmanship at the show. I’ve sought out the very best craftspeople in the country that I can, like Mark, like my drystone waller and clay renderer, all these people – I’ve found the very best people. We’re going back to very traditional techniques as a sort of kneejerk reaction to the technological overwhelm that we’re experiencing in the world at the moment.”

And Hoblyn extends a more traditional approach to all aspects of his design work. Aside from initial workings in pencil and watercolour, he describes how he made scale models of the benches to help bring the idea to life:

“I’m quite old fashioned in my design work, and I made a model of the bench out of clay, plasticine and cardboard. Then I got them scanned and made 3D printed models to bring down to Mark to show him what I wanted. He worked out how to make the benches strong by making ribs that hold them all together. It’s going into St Cuthbert’s Hospice after the show and we want it to last as a piece of garden furniture.”

Even though it’s Hoblyn’s final garden for RHS Chelsea, he’s still exuding a huge, almost childlike sense of joy and wonderment about the Together Benches at our visit. 

“They’re so good, aren’t they?! he exclaims – and we couldn’t agree more: we can't wait to see them at the Hospice UK Garden of Compassion at RHS Chelsea.