Getting in the Christmas spirit for Horatio’s Garden

Some of my colleagues and I had the wonderful opportunity to help out at Rectory Farm’s Humble Country Christmas Fayre in Oxfordshire last weekend in support of Horatio’s Garden, a spinal injury charity.

We were selling an array of beautiful Horatio’s Garden merchandise – from lavender gardener’s hand cream to Emma Bridgewater mugs – the perfect Christmas presents and stocking fillers.

Fuelled by hot drinks and Christmas cheer, over the two days we managed to introduce lots of people to the charity whilst helping them tick off their Christmas present lists. If this has acted as a reminder of the presents you still need to get then have no fear, you can buy gifts on their website by following this link.

Horatio’s Garden is a charity which builds and maintains gardens in various spinal injury centres across the UK. It gives spinally injured patients the opportunity to get outside and enjoy the sunshine in a beautiful accessible garden, away from the clinical hospital setting. In the colder months, the patients can utilise the heated garden rooms or private pods so there’s still an opportunity to have some privacy out of the ward.

I had the opportunity to visit the garden at Stanmore Hospital in the summer. It was my first time seeing one of the gardens the charity has built and I was very impressed by the beautiful plants, the hard work the volunteers do and how much it was utilised by the patients.

I met Lauren Fiszzon, arts activities assistant for Horatio’s Garden at Stanmore and she kindly let me sit in on a couple of classes she was running with patients that day.

The first was painting and it was interesting to see the equipment used to adapt the brushes to ensure that everyone could participate. The art that was created was great and a keepsake for the patients.

Later in the afternoon there was another session which was watercolour painting. Although the participants claimed to be bad at painting, the pictures produced proved otherwise.

It was great to see the work that Horatio’s Garden does and the benefit this has on patients. Even just the opportunity to leave the ward and have a natter over a tea in the garden room is clearly beneficial. I can’t quite believe that the garden hasn’t existed all along!

If you want to find out more about the charity and the work they do, you can do so by following this link.