County Limerick hospital and nursing home wins Bloom show garden

AN award-winning garden is on its way to brighten up the grounds of St  Ita’s Hospital in Newcastle West.

Robert Moore’s dementia-friendly show garden, which won the People’s Choice Award and a Silver Gilt Medal at Bloom earlier this month, is to be relocated to St Ita’s later this summer.  

St Ita’s won the nationwide competition among publicly-funded organisations and residential care centres to offer a new home to the 1950s-themed garden entitled  “Memories are Made of This”. 

The garden, which aims to take people on a trip down memory lane, was created by Robert Moore for the HSE’s Dementia: Understand Together campaign.

It contains lots of little features to prompt fond memories, including gnomes and pink flamingos, as well as memorabilia from yesteryear. And the flowers and shrubs are all favourites from the 1950s and include geraniums, foxgloves, daisies and tea roses, blended and planted to create bursts of colour and scent. 

“In coming up with the design for this garden, we wanted to put forward a real sense of what gardens were like back in the 50s,” Moore explained. “It was important for us to be authentic and true to that time. The result is a garden of two parts. There’s the iconic manicured “front garden” which, we hope, offers a feast for the eyes with its structured box hedges and tea roses. And then there’s the much more practical “back garden” with its fruit and vegetable patch offering a feast for the table. This garden is the collective story of people’s lives back then and we aim to bring that time vividly back to life today.”

“This garden is about stimulating the senses of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste from the 50s,” said Dr. Suzanne Timmons, Clinical Lead of the HSE’s National Dementia Office, who stressed  the therapeutic benefits of reminiscence for people with dementia. “So, whether it’s seeing a High Nelly bike leaning up against a stone wall, hearing Dean Martin on the wireless, smelling a rose, touching a daisy, or tasting a raspberry, the aim is to whisk the person back in time. It is about highlighting the importance and value of what is remembered and not what is forgotten.”

It is expected that the garden will be in place in St Ita’s by f September, after which there will be an official opening. It will be open to residents of St Ita’s, their  families as well as staff and members of the public.

The garden is one of a range of initiatives by the HSE’s Dementia: Understand Together campaign to create an Ireland that embraces and includes people with dementia, and that displays solidarity with them and their families.

Every year, more than 4,000 people develop dementia in Ireland and  it is estimated that there are 55,000 people living with the condition at the moment while half a million of people have had a family member with dementia.

For more information, visit www.understandtogether.ie or Freephone 1800 341 341.