Sightsavers at Chelsea Flower Show: garden audio description

Listen to our audio description about the garden using the play button below.

Transcript

The Sightsavers garden is a space designed for every sense and for everyone. It’s a sensory sanctuary where thoughtful, innovative design invites visitors to experience how inclusion, accessibility and belonging benefit us all.

Inspired by Sightsavers’ mission to protect sight, eliminate disease and champion disability rights, it reimagines an intimate urban space as a richly layered haven alive with sound, scent and texture. Immersive, welcoming and restorative, the garden celebrates how inclusive design can enrich everyday life and inspire change.

The container garden measures four metres wide by three metres deep. It’s designed to replicate a ground-floor patio garden in an urban block of flats. Simple materials, multi-sensory planting and a central turning circle designed for wheelchair users invite people to slow down, pause, connect and imagine a more inclusive and sustainable world.

Visitors can brush against textured foliage, breathe in aromatic herbs, feel the warmth of sunlit brick and listen to the gentle fall of water. At the heart of our garden, a corten-steel water halo gathers rain, releasing it into a cooling pool that fills the space with a quiet calm.

Towards the back of the garden is a clay sculpture formed from earth minerals. It is shaped from the moulding of the cork oak tree, with a precious stone that represents the ‘tree of life’ sitting nestled within the bark. The sculpture was created and gifted by Clay Moon.

All the plants and trees in the garden are housed within seven innovative planters of various sizes. These have been built using interlocking bricks, removing the need for cement. Some of the bricks in the containers and around the garden have been personalised by artists, celebrities and Sightsavers supporters.

The containers have planting combinations including:

• Dill, Papaver, Verbascum clementine, rosemary and Stachys byzantina
• Achillea moonshine, Achillea terracotta, Allium schoenoprasum, Salvia purpurascens, Deschampsia and Salvia nemorosa
• Thymus, Sedum and Muehlenbeckia

Within cracks and crevices between the bricks and throughout the garden, there are plants such as Nasturtium ‘Yeti’ and Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Prostratus’.

As this is a multisensory garden, the plants have been chosen to be accessible, engaging and enjoyable for all visitors. Bold, contrasting colours make the garden visually striking and easier to navigate, while each plant also offers additional sensory experiences.

Touch: Stachys byzantina – its soft, hairy silver-grey leaves are comforting to touch and look visually striking.

Smell: Thymus serpyllum (creeping thyme) – a low-growing, spreading plant with colourful flowers and fragrant leaves that release scent when brushed. It’s drought-tolerant, resilient and loved by pollinators.

Hear: Briza media – its swaying movement creates a gentle, swishing sound, adding a dynamic sensory layer.

Taste: Allium schoenoprasum (chives) – its round purple flowers are edible, attractive to pollinators and self-seed easily into cracks and crevices.

See: Verbascum ‘Clementine’ – an elegant drought-tolerant perennial with tall spikes of densely packed orange flower heads and contrasting purple centres held above silvery grey felted leaves.