Horatio's Garden

We had to be up very early for the long drive to Stoke Mandeville, but when J was offered the opportunity of post-operative referral to an internationally renowned specialist centre, we knew it should not be turned down. She will be an "outreach" patient, with initial face-to-face contact followed by occasional in person or remote appointments combined, we hope, with liaison with local services. We hope this will help us all to manage the combination of newer and pre-existing problems and disabilities with which she must now live.

We arrived more than an hour early thanks to an almost miraculously free-flowing journey round the M25; we had expected the kind of near-stationery congestion we could see on the opposite carriageway. This gave us the opportunity to sit in Horatio's Garden, a beautifully designed and planted space wrapped around and between the buildings, offering tranquillity and delight to patients, staff and visitors. It was designed by Joe Swift, well-known to UK viewers of gardening programmes, and is perfectly suited to the centre's many wheelchair users, with easily negotiated and attractive hard surfaces, raised planters and beds, and wonderful aromatic, softly coloured planting. We ate an early picnic lunch there, with P's delicious sunflower hummus and baba ganoush from our aubergine harvest, and returned there after three hours of meetings to snack and drink fruit tea before braving the rush hour. We arrived at home eleven hours after leaving; the garden was a welcome and delightful oasis in a tiring and demanding day.