The Sightsavers Garden: We Start With Sight But We Don’t Stop There

The garden

A sensory sanctuary where thoughtful, innovative design invites us to experience how inclusion, accessibility and belonging benefit everyone.

Inspired by Sightsavers’ mission to protect sight, eliminate disease, and champion disability rights, this garden reimagines an intimate urban space as a richly layered haven alive with sound, scent, and texture. Simple materials, multi-sensory planting and a central turning circle designed for wheelchair users welcome all visitors, inviting them to slow down, pause, connect, and to imagine a more inclusive and sustainable world.

Brush against textured foliage, breathe in aromatic herbs, feel the warmth of sunlit brick, and listen to the gentle fall of water. Planters and walls, built from interlocking three-hole bricks personalised by artists, staff, and supporters, symbolise growth, resilience and collective strength. At the heart, a corten-steel water halo gathers rain, releasing it into a cooling pool that fills the space with a quiet calm. Immersive, welcoming, and restorative, the garden celebrates how inclusive design can enrich everyday life and inspire change.

Key plants

This is a multisensory garden, with planting 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 – soft, hairy silver-grey leaves that are comforting to touch and visually striking
• Smell: Thymus serpyllum (creeping thyme) – a low-growing, spreading plant with colourful flowers and fragrant leaves that release scent when brushed. 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) – round purple flowers that 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

Plants supplier: Bernhards Nursery
Soundscape: Dr Helen Anahita Wilson

Sustainability notes

This container garden features innovative, mortarless brick planters built with a three-hole brick and vertical dowel system – a low-tech, sustainable method that’s easy to relocate and install. Some bricks include bee holes to support urban biodiversity, while the permeable gravel surface reduces runoff and provides habitat for ground-nesting bees. Together, these thoughtful, low-cost techniques show how eco-friendly design can benefit both people and wildlife.

The designers – Peter Karn, Sarah Fisher and Janice Molyneux

“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,” Peter Karn, Sarah Fisher and Janice Molyneux.

Barker Langham believes that experiences should be unexpected, unforgettable, and grounded in extraordinary stories. Their work spans exhibitions, landscapes, cultural programmes, immersive installations, and more – all designed to connect people with ideas in transformative ways. 

Ostara Garden Design, founded by Janice Molyneux and Sarah Fisher, brings a sensitive, nature-led approach to garden design. With backgrounds in history teaching and art therapy, their work is infused with storytelling, wellbeing, and empathy. Ostara gardens are beautiful, sustainable, and meaningful – spaces where people and wildlife thrive together. The name Ostara, drawn from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, reflects their commitment to renewal and balance in every landscape they create.

About the charity – Sightsavers

Sightsavers’ vision is of a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes and where people with disabilities can participate equally in society. Working in more than 30 countries across Africa and Asia, the organisation addresses eye conditions including cataracts and refractive error, treats and prevents debilitating diseases such as trachoma and river blindness, and promotes disability-inclusive global development.

About the Belonging Forum

The Belonging Forum is a global movement advancing the right to belong - a birthright that connects us to one another, to the places we call home, to the systems that shape our lives and to a shared sense of purpose. We bring together research, advocacy and action to ensure belonging is embedded in policies, institutions and everyday life. Through collaboration with thought leaders, community builders and changemakers around the world, we turn ideas into impact and build a world where everyone can flourish.

Garden legacy

The garden is being relocated to Chailey Heritage Foundation in Sussex after the show. Chailey Heritage Foundation is a charity that runs an outstanding school for children and young people, aged three to 19, who live with complex physical disabilities and associated health needs. The garden will be built within a redeveloped section of their therapy farm at the school, which will also be available to the general public.