Last year, NHS St George’s Hospital in Tooting won the Plant & Pause Nominate Your Community Space competition, receiving £2.5k in prizes.
Home and garden retailer, Robert Dyas, is delighted to reintroduce their campaign, Plant & Pause, after a successful second year in 2024. The initiative, which focuses on the benefits of utilising your outdoor space to promote good mental health and wellbeing, kicks off on Wednesday 19th March and runs until the end of Mental Health Awareness Week (18th May), which focuses on the theme of ‘community’.
The nationwide Nominate Your Community Space competition, which ran last year, will run again throughout the whole campaign (19th March - 18th May), offering a prize of £2.5k worth of garden equipment for the winner to transform their green space. This year’s prizes include a Forest Garden summerhouse, VegTrug planters and a lawnmower, to name just a few.
For the third year running, we've teamed up with Robert Dyas to support the project, bringing over 40 years of experience, using therapeutic gardening to help improve people’s physical, mental, and social health.
In 2021, the RHS released research that revealed those who garden every day have wellbeing scores 6.6% higher and stress levels 4.2% lower than people who don’t garden at all. Surveying more than 6000 people, the research showed a significant association between gardening more frequently and improvements in wellbeing, perceived stress and physical activity*.
As part of the Plant & Pause campaign last year, the retailer’s Nominate Your Community Space competition saw the NHS St George’s Hospital in Tooting scoop £2.5k worth of garden equipment to transform the green space on their dementia ward. The hospital team has been using the prizes to turn the space into a sensory garden for dementia patients and staff. The project also has further outreach, with vegetables grown in the garden being donated to a community fridge.
The St George’s team, with Angela Holder, Student Nursing Associate, holding her gesh CARE Awards 'Volunteer of the Year' certificate.
One year on, the Robert Dyas team has revisited St George’s to see how the project has evolved and witness how their competition has benefited the local community.
Robert Dyas’ Marketing Manager, Donna Jackson, says: “It’s been fabulous to learn how both dementia patients and staff at NHS St George’s Hospital are benefiting from our competition. Together with the dementia ward team, we’ve achieved exactly what we at Robert Dyas set out to do – improve the mental health and wellbeing of people in the community via gardening – and it’s why we’re running our Nominate Your Community Space competition again this year.”
Kate Slemeck, Managing Director at St George’s University Hospital NHS Trust, said: “It’s been wonderful seeing the garden taking shape and providing a calm and tranquil space for patients living with dementia, staff and our local communities.
“A big thank you to the dementia team and our grounds team for their dedication to giving our patients the best possible experience while in our care.”
The winner of this year’s competition will be announced on 27th June.
Whether it’s a community garden or space, or a charity looking to create a sensory garden, entrants are invited to send their nominations to nominateyourspace@robertdyas.co.uk. Shortlisted entries will be assessed by the retailer’s esteemed panel of judges: Chairman and owner of Robert Dyas, Theo Paphitis; Robert Dyas’ Marketing Manager, Donna Jackson; Thrive’s Training & Education Officer, Mark Emery; The Sun’s gardening columnist Veronica Lorraine; and multi-RHS-award-winning influencer the Cloud Gardener.
As one of the UK’s leading home and garden retailers for over 150 years, the team at Robert Dyas advocates gardening for physical and mental health, and encourages the nation to use their outdoor space and reap the benefits, just as we do.
We deliver therapeutic gardening programmes for people with ill health and disabilities, community outreach programmes to schools, hospitals and care homes, and more than 600 garden projects up and down the country. We also offer comprehensive training courses for professionals in social and therapeutic horticulture, as well as sharing gardening advice via our Cultivating Wellbeing app and engaging in horticultural research.
Robert Dyas will be encouraging their followers and members of the public to join in and share their Plant & Pause moments using the hashtag, #PlantandPause.
With warm weather on the way, there’s no better time to get involved with this wonderful wellness initiative. So follow along online with tips and guidance from two gardening experts, Robert Dyas and Thrive, and improve your mental health and wellbeing like the staff and patients at NHS St George’s Hospital.
