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The Bupa Garden

The Bupa Garden - transcript

Carol Klein:  As part of Bupa’s Century Garden project Designer, Cleve West, has created a sanctuary for residents of a care home. 

Cleve West:  It’s a very calm space, we’ve got a giant ball at the back, which when I describe it to people it sounds very scary, a seven foot concrete ball, but actually you see it in real life, it’s really calming and peaceful.  I mean if you notice the paths in the garden they’re all interconnected and it’s derived from the figure 8, because the whole point of this garden is it’s going to a care home where people suffer from dementia and Parkinson’s disease, a garden with dead ends is potentially confusing to people with dementia.  So that’s why all the paths are sort of interconnected and no dead ends at all in the garden.  The trees are Amelanchiers which are beautiful, a lovely tree multi-stemmed Amelanchiers and they’ll provide shade throughout the garden.  Well, we’ve used roses from Robert Mattock, we’ve got some lovely climbing roses in the garden and that’s really important because Bupa did a survey amongst some of its care homes and it turns out that roses are the most popular plant that people can remember.  So we’ve put them in the garden because it may be just enough to carry someone through the day and that, I think is very important.