Rebecca Wallersteiner is blown away by Peter Karn, Sarah Fisher and Janice Molyneux’s multi-sensory Sightsavers Garden which provides a rich and immersive experience that engages all the senses
Kicking off the British summer, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show has thrown open its doors once again. Spring was extremely early this year and many plants will have finished flowering, however the horticultural magicians have ingenious plans to deal with this. Despite some garden designers complaining to me about being battered by freezing hails-storms during the last few days, the gardens were as stunning as ever, with several health-themed gardens such as the Lady Garden Foundation ‘Silent No More’ Garden, The Children’s Society Garden and The Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden.
One of the most striking smaller gardens to look forward to at this year’s RHS Chelsea is Peter Karn, Sarah Fisher and Janice Molyneux’s Sightsavers Garden, built by Castle Landscapes, in partnership with Belonging Forum, Barker Langham and Ostara Garden Design. This beautiful garden is a sensory sanctuary where thoughtful innovative design invites everyone to enjoy its restorative properties. “Our ambition as garden designers is to create more meaningful and inclusive garden spaces that enhance well-being, particularly in urban and communal areas. We aim to design gardens that can be enjoyed by everyone while also providing pockets and corridors for wildlife across cities, combining beauty, accessibility, and biodiversity in every project,” say the garden’s designers.
Copyright: Ellie Sparrow, Barker Langham
Access to nature and gardens is important for health and wellbeing, yet it can be difficult for people with disabilities to find accessible green spaces to chill out. Inspired by Sightsavers’ aim to champion disability rights, this multisensory garden reimagines an intimate urban space as a richly layered haven alive with sound, scent and texture and is designed to be easy for wheelchair users to navigate. All visitors to this beautiful garden are invited to slow down, pause, connect and enjoy the beauty around them.
At the centre of the garden, a steel water halo collects rainwater, releasing it into a pool that fills the space with a quiet, restorative calm. Bold, contrasting colours make the garden visually striking as well as easier to navigate for visually impaired people.
Close your eyes when you visit this sensuous garden to enable your other senses to experience its multi-sensory qualities. Touch the velvety, silver-grey leaves of Stachys byzantine that are also visually striking, as well as comforting to feel. Breathe in the garden’s aromatic rosemary and Thymus serpyllum (creeping thyme), a low-growing, spreading plant with colourful flowers and fragrant leaves that release scent when touched. This plant is not only delicious to smell, but also drought tolerant and loved by birds and bees alike. Scent is particularly powerful because its receptors connect directly to areas of the brain linked to emotions and memories. That is why an aroma can trigger memories from years ago. Listen to the gentle, relaxing patter of water falling into the pool and swishing of the Brizia media as it moves in the breeze. Taste the edible, purple flowers of Allium schoenoprasum (chives) that are self-seed easily into cracks and crevices and are attractive to pollinators. Then, open your eyes again to see the Verbascum ‘Clementine’ an elegant drought tolerant perennial with tall spikes of densely packed orange flower heads with contrasting purple centres and silvery grey leaves.
Copyright: Rebecca Wallersteiner
Visitors will also be able to enjoy an innovative soundscape developed by composer and sound artist Dr Helen Anahita Wilson, which uses the bioelectric signals of plants generated through growth and photosynthesis to create sound. If you are visually impaired you will be able to listen to an audio description of the garden via the NaviLens app.
The international development charity Sightsavers works in more than thirty countries across Africa and Asia to treat eye conditions including cataracts and refractive errors, helps prevent debilitating diseases such as trachoma and river blindness and promotes disability-inclusive global development.
After the show, this thoughtful and sensitive garden will be relocated to Chailey Heritage Foundation in Sussex. The Foundation is a charity that runs an outstanding school for children and young people aged three to nineteen, who live with complex physical disabilities and associated health needs. The garden will be re-built within a redeveloped selection of their therapy farm at the school, which will also be available to the general public. Don’t miss seeing it!
Plants have been supplied by Bernhards Nursery.
- The Sightsavers Garden at Chelsea Flower Show - May 22, 2026
- “My Head is a Fairground” - April 24, 2026
- Fenella Fielding – Onstage, Offstage - November 3, 2025
