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Midlands Air Ambulance Charity
A powerful new design explores trauma and medical emergency through to recovery and the restorative power of nature.
Midlands Air Ambulance Charity is set to unveil a deeply moving show garden at BBC Gardeners’ World Live in June 2025, a space that offers not just horticultural inspiration but an emotional resonance. The charity’s Medicinal Garden has been conceived as a living tribute to the charity’s lifesaving work and the positive impact it has on patients' recovery.
“Our organisation is best known for delivering advanced treatment via our rapid response helicopters and critical care cars, which is why our Medicinal Garden places emotional recovery at its heart, acknowledging that for many patients, survivors, families, and crew, the impact trauma and medical emergencies have on patients,” states Emma Gray, Chief Operating Officer, for Midlands Air Ambulance Charity. “We are exceptionally proud to be part of BBC Gardeners’ World Live this year and look forward to welcoming visitors and supporters in June.”
The garden will feature at BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2025, taking place at the NEC in Birmingham between 12-15th June. Created by garden designers Lucy Chapman* and Helen Swan**, and to be built by renowned Pershore-based landscaper Rupert Keys***, the garden uses landform and planting to create a symbolic journey. Ribbons of lifesaving plants ripple across two sweeping mounds, their sunrise tones echoing the dawn of hope and renewal. Chosen for their healing associations as much as their visual impact, these plants link modern emergency care to its roots in nature.
“The garden was never just about beauty,” explains co-designer Helen Swan. “It’s about honesty. We have created a space that acknowledges patients’ trauma, yet also reflects the strength that can be drawn from life-changing experiences and the role nature can play in rebuilding lives. People often underestimate how healing it can be to simply sit among trees and feel the sun warming a bench. After trauma, that connection with the outdoors can be transformational.”
Visitors to the much-anticipated BBC Gardeners’ World Live event, which attracts more than 90,000 people, will be invited into the immersive show garden by following a meandering path that cuts gently between two rising mounds, a metaphorical journey from the moment of crisis to calm. Seating areas at the centre of the journey offer spaces to pause and reflect. Native trees edge the garden, filtering views and offering a sense of protection and perspective.
Fellow designer, Lucy Chapman, added: “For us, the garden reflects not just Midlands Air Ambulance Charity’s emergency response, but our understanding of the emotional recovery that follows. The feedback we hear from those the service has helped is often about small things, being able to walk again, hear birdsong, and feel rooted in life once more. The garden embodies this.”
Every detail in the garden reflects the designers’ core sustainable principles: permeable paths, locally sourced soil, stone and clay, reclaimed materials, and resilient planting suited to changing climates. It offers visitors the opportunity to think differently about how to approach their own gardens - by creating interest and biodiversity through topography, landforms and self-seeding planting as an alternative to lawns, borders and paving.
Following its appearance at BBC Gardeners’ World Live 2025, at a later date elements of the garden will be permanently relocated to Midlands Air Ambulance Charity’s airbase and charity headquarters in Shifnal, Shropshire. There, it will serve as an enduring place of reflection and remembrance, for patients, families, and the crew who serve them with quiet bravery every day.
For the charity’s supporters, this is more than just a garden. It will be a story told in soil, stone, and bloom, a message of hope for anyone who has known pain, and a reminder that nature, in all its simplicity, can be a powerful partner in recovery.
To support the charity’s lifesaving work or learn more, visit midlandsairambulance.com, or join the conversation by following the charity on social media.