Chelsea Flower Show helps RHS fund gardens for social prescribing

As the public attend the world famous Chelsea Flower Show, its organiser the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), is backing a ‘social prescribing’ pilot scheme to help GPs refer patients to work in gardens.

The plant charity is helping GPs offer 'gardening on prescription' to patients with mental health issues and dementia by getting them involved in allotments and gardens.

The NHS is supporting social prescribing schemes which include gardening, to help people stay fit and healthy in ways that go beyond pills and medical procedures.

This year, the government announced plans to refer almost one million patients to social prescribing schemes offering more personalised care.

One garden involved in the pilot scheme has patients from the NHS Simmons House Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatient Unit, who will be working with a local allotment association.

Owd' Martha's Yard in Barnsley offers gardening activities for people referred by their GP to the area's social prescribing scheme.

A show garden from the Chelsea Flower Show will also be dug up and planted at an NHS mental health trust.

This follows last year’s efforts by the RHS, which resulted in Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust receiving a Chelsea Flower Show garden.

This year's show features many gardens with well-being and mental health as a theme, including a garden designed by the Duchess of Cambridge, which aims to encourage parents and children to reduce stress by getting back to nature.

The plant charity’s ‘RHS Vision’ document states: ‘Domestic gardens and cultivated plants are a public national health service.

‘Gardening helps people to be healthy and is good for us physically and mentally. Gardening relaxes us, eases stress, provides exercise and improves physical psychological wellbeing.

‘More than 90 per cent of us in the UK say that just looking at a garden lifts our mood.’