Explorer welcomes new healing garden at Royal Cornwall Hospital

The healing garden has been funded entirely by charitable donations

The ground-breaking ceremony for a Critical Care Healing Garden at the Royal Cornwall Hospital has taken place.

The healing garden has been funded entirely by charitable donations.

One of the fundraisers was explorer and Covid-19 survivor Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Once completed, medical gases will be piped directly into the garden, meaning critically ill patients will be able to spend more time in the garden.

Robin Hanbury-Tenison spent five weeks in intensive care at Derriford Hospital and puts his recovery, in part, down to the hospital's healing garden.

Mr Hanbury-Tenison has raised money for the healing garden

He was one of the first people in the South West to become seriously ill with Covid-19, in early March 2020, a couple of days after returning from a skiing trip in France.

Since his recovery, Mr Hanbury-Tenison has raised more than £100,000 for the healing garden at the Royal Cornwall Hospital.

In October 2020, at 84 years old, he climbed Cornwall's highest peak - Brown Willy on Bodmin Moor - to raise money for the garden project.

Speaking at the ground-breaking ceremony, Mr Hanbury-Tenison said: "Well this is a fantastic moment, at last, we're there, and I've just cut the symbolic first sod, and in a couple of months, we'll be bringing lots of plants in here. and the garden will be beginning."

'I'm going to live'

Mr Hanbury-Tenison said he thought his recovery at Derriford Hospital was "a kind of miracle".

He said: "I was in a miracle for five weeks, with everything, I was on dialysis, and ventilators, every kind of thing you can imagine, with tubes coming out of everywhere.

"In fact, they gave me up for dead three times, and rang up Louella and said 'prepare yourself for difficult news, and if he does come out he'll be severely brain-damaged'.

"So it is a miracle that after five weeks when they couldn't wake me up from the coma, they wheeled me out into Derriford's healing garden, Derriford was the first hospital in the country to have one and I was only the second person to go in there, and amazingly, I opened my eyes, I smelt the flowers, felt the sun on my face, and croaked through my tracheotomy tube 'I'm going to live', and miraculously I did."

'Extremely special'

Rob Hague, lead for the healing garden project at Royal Cornwall Hospital, said he had been speaking to staff at Derriford Hospital to learn from their experiences.

He said: "It's extremely special, I came into my role in this team in May last year, shortly before that my mother, she passed from cancer, but she was a lover of the outdoors and an avid gardener, and while she was staying within the hospital, if this space was available to her, she'd have absolutely loved to be out here, and it would have massively improved her quality of life towards the end of it.

"So, for me personally, it's of massive importance to be involved in this project."

When finished, the garden will be filled with sensory plants, seating, dedicated areas for hospital beds and a centrepiece sculpture donated by Cornish sculptor Kurt Jackson.