Healing garden for Cornwall's critical care patients will be built this summer
A Covid survivor and fundraiser is visiting the site's display at the Royal Cornwall Show
Last updated 10th Jun 2022
A miniature version of Cornwall's soon to be built critical care healing garden is on display at the Royal Cornwall Show.
Visitors to the show's Flower Tent will also be able to see what the garden at Treliske will look like using 3D virtual reality.
The display has been created to raise awareness of the site, which is set to be created within a Trelawny Wing courtyard of the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro later this summer.
RCHT Charity, together with the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust’s Critical Care, Organ Donation and Building Brilliance teams, are also hoping to raise further funds and pledges for additional plants and enhanced sensory items for the critically ill patients, their families and staff who will use the garden.
The teams say these spaces are vital for the health and wellbeing of the Duchy's most poorly patients.
Visitors can place their fundraising pledges on a special tree, as well as buy succulents from Critical Care Sister Rachel Driver.
The garden’s key fundraiser, renowned explorer and Cornwall resident, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, together with his wife Louella, are supporting the stand on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th June.
Robin will also be speaking at the show and telling his very personal story of survival having contracted Covid-19 in March 2020 and how such a garden at Plymouth's Derriford Hospital saved his life.
It is this experience that inspired him to want to raise the funds to create a healing garden for Cornwall’s critical patients and the Royal Cornwall Hospitals' NHS Trust.
Robin said: "I was one of the first people to go down with Covid very, very badly. I was given up for dead three times, told I had a less than 5% chance of living and miraculously survived five weeks in a coma by being wheeled out into Derriford's healing garden; the first one in Britain.
"It's not just for the patients, it's for the nurses as well because intensive care units are pretty horrible places to work. There's noise and bells and sterility; it's a horrid place. So being wheeled out as a patient or being able to walk out into the garden as a nurse is going to make all the difference to their lives".
RCHT Charity is hoping that with Robin's support, alongside the various RCHT volunteers who are attending the Royal Cornwall Show across the three days, it will return to the trust with "brim-full buckets of donations and a beautiful leafy tree full of pledges".
You can visit the miniature healing garden at the Royal Cornwall Show Flower Tent or find out more about the fundraising appeal on the RCHT website.
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