Award winning treatment for St Luke's

The area outside the reception building at St Luke’s Hospice Plymouth looks stunning after local gardener Sam Ovens worked his green fingered magic and transformed the bare patches of earth in to a fantastic natural garden.

25 year old Sam, from Pelynt near Looe in Cornwall, recently won the Young Designer of the Year Award at the prestigious Royal Horticultural Society’s Flower Show at Tatton Park with his show garden “The Sky’s the Limit”. It was his wish after the show was over to donate the whole garden to St Luke’s and a few weeks ago the hundreds of plants were delivered to the hospice at Turnchapel .

Over the duration of a few days a small band of enthusiastic volunteers armed with spades, forks and plenty of energy planted out pink verbenas along with delicate blue agastache and sweet smelling oregano interspersed with beautiful grasses that give the garden wonderful texture and movement framing the building at St Luke’s perfectly.

The intention of Sam’s award winning designer was to reconnect people with plants and wildlife, and remind us how precious our outdoor spaces are. “I wanted to show that sometimes the simplest things are the best things,” he says. “I think the hospice is a perfect home for the garden and I am really pleased with the way the design has turned out”.

Within a few minutes of planting butterflies and bees were already taking advantage of the new garden and visitors to the hospice were stopping to congratulate the volunteers on such a wonderful effort and commenting on how beautiful the garden was looking.