‘Imperfections are what gives us character’: a prickly garden to help teenagers blossom

Plants whose beauty is flawed carry a message in Children’s Society garden, a gold medal winner at Chelsea flower show

Gardens do not have to be perfect to be beautiful – and neither do teenagers. That is the central message behind the Children’s Society garden, which has won a gold medal at this year’s RHS Chelsea flower show. And prickly poppies, a bird’s nest fern planted in a drain and verbascum arcturus, a delicate-looking yellow flower with hairy stems, are among the plants chosen to convey it – plants whose beauty is flawed.

“The overlaying narrative of the garden is ‘beauty in imperfection’,” said the designer, Patrick Clarke. “Perfection is the most debilitating thing for young people because it’s something that is unattainable, and when they’re bombarded with images of perfection on social media … that is very, I think, threatening to people’s mental health.”

He hopes the garden will show how imperfections are “what gives us character – and character is what makes us all different and what makes us all beautiful”.

To enter, visitors must follow a slightly crooked path, avoid stepping on small plants that have been deliberately placed in their way, and walk over steel water rills that encircle the design.

“You have to be quite brave to step into the garden,” said the project manager, Clarissa Freeman. “There are a few obstacles you’ve got to weave around – and that’s just life, isn’t it? Life isn’t always a straight line, life isn’t always perfect.”

The path leads to a sunken seating area where young people can sit and talk, surrounded by dense and lush planting. “You get that feeling of being enclosed in green space, which we know is beneficial to the mental health of young people,” Freeman said.

She hopes the teenagers who will use the space, when it is relocated to a youth club in Bedfordshire, will feel as if the garden is “giving them a hug”.

The prickly poppy, one of the star plants of the garden, is “such a beautiful, dainty flower, a really soft buttery yellow … but it shows you can have beauty with prickliness, that prickly doesn’t necessarily mean bad. It’s actually really gorgeous,” Freeman said.

Although young people can be prickly sometimes, “it was more about the prickliness of life and the prickliness of the journey, [which] can be a bit difficult and challenging, but it can also be beautiful,” she said.

She hopes it conveys a message of resilience. “What the Children’s Society are really trying to push against is the idea that we should be trying to eliminate all of these [challenges in life], which is just an impossibility. Life isn’t always easy, but the journey is what makes us who we are as individuals. We are more characterful and beautiful and individualistic as a result of the challenges we face.”

At the back, near the main waterfall feature, there is a solo seating area tucked away under the canopy of a twisted, native field maple tree, where teens who wish to be alone with their thoughts can seek the sanctuary of a calm, sheltered space. Whenever they are ready, they can return to the more sociable seating area via a concealed, unpaved path.

The garden furniture was made from fallen trees deemed too imperfect to be used as furniture elsewhere. “These trees would generally be just sent for biomass [an organic fuel] and seen as not fit for purpose,” Clarke said.

Instead, the carpenter Olly Hill, an innovative craftsman based in Cornwall, has created bespoke chairs and tables from the timber. He added tiny joins that look like stitches to the largest cracks in the wood.

“We’re making an analogy about those tiny interventions that the Children’s Society make in young people’s lives, giving them that additional little bit of resilience and strength to move forward,” Clarke said.

Using discarded concrete paving slabs from skips and reclamation yards, he has created a path that appears to be strewn with different-coloured jewels. “We’ve cut the slabs in such a way to show the inside, which is actually really beautiful because you see the aggregate – it looks a little bit like terrazzo tiling,” Clarke said.

After Chelsea, the garden will be replanted at central Bedfordshire council’s Leighton Buzzard youth centre, where a Children’s Society youth club is based, creating the charity’s first outdoor wellbeing space for young people. It will be accessible to the wider Bedfordshire community.

“It will be a haven for them that they can use on a daily basis,” Freeman said.