Horatio’s Garden
By Camilla Hiley (Weatherby, 1981)
A sanctuary of healing and hope I have been designing domestic gardens for more than ten years now, and projects vary enormously. If you are lucky, a project comes along that is very special. My involvement with the first ‘Horatio’s Garden’ at The Duke of Cornwall Spinal Centre in Salisbury was one such project. This garden was the brainchild of teenager Horatio Chapple. His father is a consultant spinal surgeon at the Unit, and Horatio was hoping to follow both his parents into Medicine. He realised the need for
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an outdoor space for the patients to visit whilst rehabilitating at the Centre. Sadly, Horatio was killed in a tragic accident in 2011. As a local garden designer, I was asked to advise the spinal surgeons, NHS staff and Horatio’s family on how to realise his vision. Building on an NHS site is very different to building a domestic garden and is fraught with complexities, from logistics to the make-up of the site. The first thing was
