This is a special week in the horticultural calendar. It is the RHS Chelsea Flower show and over the course of the week thousands of people will visit the show and millions will watch the BBC coverage of it on television.

There will be incredible show gardens, conceived months and months ago with designers and growers and build teams coming together to create something beautiful. But where do these gardens go when the show ends on Saturday?

This episode tells the story of one garden - Hospitalfield Arts Garden. We visit a beautiful walled garden in Arbroath and a school that must be one of the closest to the sea in the UK. The children aren't allowed to eat snacks in the playground because of the swooping seagulls! And they are linked by a Nigel Dunnett designed sand garden, funded by Project Giving back which is on show this week at RHS Chelsea.

I hope you enjoy this story.

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Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

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Welcome to our Plant stories.

Every year in the third week of May, the RHS holds the Chelsea Flower Show, a 20 acre site with hundreds of exhibits, including 31 gardens, thousands of plants. 145,000 people will visit during the week long show, with millions more viewing the BBC's television coverage.

That's a lot of people looking at plants. For our plant stories, I wanted to focus down on one story and it picks up on some of the themes we've talked about before.

How do we nurture the love of nature in the next generation?

I became involved in gardens and horticulture because of childhood experiences. I was exposed to it by my parents.

I'm very aware that that's very lucky because so many people growing up in cities or whatever just don't have that contact.

So I think it's almost like a duty that we have to provide opportunities for children to have contact with beautiful nature because that contact and what it does can last for a lifetime. And so many children now don't have that.

That's the garden designer, Nigel Dunnett, who I recorded as he sat in his latest Chelsea Garden before the opening of the show. In the middle of his garden, there's an artist's bothy. You can see a piece of work propped up on an easel which reads 'Gardens are the new galleries'.

The bothy has underfloor heating and is surrounded by sand dunes full of plants. This garden, funded by Project Giving Back, is for a charity called Hospitalfield.

Our name is quite difficult. It emerges from the 12th century when this site was a hostel or hospital.

The monks who came into Arbroath, a very, very busy abbey, all the visitors, the monks wanted a stopping off point of hostel, and this is the site of that. Hostel or hospitalfield, it's the same word, essentially.

So Hospitalfield is an artist house and we run a residency program and it's about this quite silent, quiet opportunity for artists to get on with their work. That's a rare commodity, whether that's a writer or a choreographer.

We rooted in the visual arts historically but we do support a broad range of arts practices, and we want to share that, this place with others. And often people will say, I've lived in Arbroathfor 40 years and I've never been to Hospitalfield, so how can we turn that around?

Because that's crazy if we have this beautiful historic house and we need to make a destination here because we need more visitors to the town.

So making a garden alongside our arts programs is, I think, a very good idea to create a destination so that people will come and use the cafe and have a lovely day out in this really rather glorious place and learn about not just the 19th century history, which the house represents, but also the garden gives us this opportunity to talk a little bit more about the 12th century, the imagined idea of how the monks might have used the garden for their medicine and for other, for food.

So when Nigel designed this garden, what was behind it? Was it the idea of the monks and how they would have used it?

Well, we asked him to tell 800 years of garden history in his garden design. He didn't wince when I said that.

Mainly, I think, because of the cyclical nature of gardens, you know, that there's a period now where we're using gardens for produce much more. That's very, very important. We're thinking about food security, we're thinking about all these things.

Those ideas align very much with the much earlier period of the use of garden, the medieval period. And of course, the Victorians through the Grand Tour, brought all these really exotic plants here. So now we can't unlearn that.

So we're using those same ideas around gardening that one might have had in the 12th century, but with all the exotics that have been accumulated through history.

So that's what this garden represents. But what does the Chelsea Garden represent? So what's the story of the Chelsea Garden?

The story of the Chelsea Garden?

So I think Nigel really wanted to explore this idea of the sand dune garden, coming from his incredible knowledge around climate change and the fact that we have a sand dune landscape around us on the coast. You know, we can see the sea if we stand up and look over the wall. So that fixed these thoughts, right? These things match up together.

This is, you know, hospitalfield out of coastline. And then we were talking, he said, oh, well, it could be any coast. I said, no, it's got to be this coast. You know, it's got to be.

Because if we're talking about Hospitalfield Arts Garden, Arbroath.

And I think he's got more and more interested in that, being more specific about location, but whilst also persuading me and talking, you know, being clear about the fact that it's really climate that is important impact on location and that will be extended all the way down this coast.

But of course we're all championing our bit of coast, but of course it'll be pretty much the same in Suffolk Hall, Norfolk, which is just only a few hundred miles away, but we're still east coast. That east coast sand dune landscape that has influenced him.

Then the question of the garden, where it would come back to, because of course we already have this really astounding Nigel Dunnett design garden and Project Giving Back urged us to think about that a bit harder. And we just thought all the work we do with schools.

We have very close working relationship with two primary schools that are within walking distance of us. Ladyloan are a little bit further than that.

But this garden provides us an opportunity to start a working relationship with them and to think about how the arts and creativity can be part of a really central part of their world.

So I travelled the short distance to Ladyloan primary school. At 3.20pm school over, the children head home and I meet Rachel David, a class teacher and the sustainability lead for the school. And we wandered into the playground.

The pupils have been talking about and preparing for the arrival of Nigel's garden for a while now and they've cleared out their polytunnel, ready for the plants. They won't be surprised by the sand.

Ladyloan Primary School is probably one of the closest schools to the sea that you will find in Britain. It is a very inclusive, nurturing school. We're very proud of all the learners that we have here and all the different types of learners we have.

We're a resource school, so that means we educate children that have multiple support needs, whether that be social or physical or emotional as well. We have a nursery on our school and it's from primary one to primary seven, so five up to 12.

But in our nursery we have learners as young as two, which is lovely. So it's a great school. It's very inclusive, very nurturing. The staff are amazing and our kids are even more amazing.

How aware are the children of coastal erosion?

So when we found out that we were going to be recipients of the garden, we did a little bit of research.

So the sustainability leaders pupil group within the school, so that's a group of primary four to primary seven pupils, they carried out a bit of research into coastal erosion. Actually, what it is and how it affects us in Angus. So where we are and where the children call home. And I think they were really, I was honestly gobsmacked by this too. And they were really. I think they were almost a bit not frightened, but just like very, I don't know how I would describe it, but just very aware of that climate change is happening right now in front of us. So we're looking up in Montrose, they've got the coast there and there's a really nice golf course there.

And every year huge chunks of it fall into the sea. So within the children's lifetime, in the next, I think it was the next two decades, you could sort of see how that is going to, half the golf course is just going to disappear. And then I think it was in the next 50 years that erosion will almost be into the town centre. So it's, it's real.

And I think maybe talking about the children being worried, being scared about it actually. Yeah. Because it is something we, we all should be scared of. But it's not a hopeless thing either, that there is something that we can do about it.

But also the powers that be, they have to do their bit too. We're only one small part in that machine. So. Yeah. But we did a lot of learning around that and it was really interesting.

And even just the discussions that you then seen or heard happening in classes across the school was really interesting.

And they gave the school a little project, sort of like a design challenge off the back of this assembly and they asked them to look at, come up with a design that could help stop the effects of coastal erosion.

And it was really interesting and just to see, because the classes were mixed up, so you had some like, primary ones, 5 year olds working with 10 year olds and just the discussions and the ideas and they were making it as well, using like blocks and wood and blocks to like build it all together and sort of come up with their ideas about how they could do that. And it's all, it's blue sky thinking, but it's problem solving.

And these are skills that are useful, especially when we're thinking, thinking about how are we going to stop the effects impacting us daily of climate change. Because it is going to start to become something we see consistently in the future.

So tell me where we're sitting. It's a little bit windy, but as you have pointed out, we are very close to the sea.

Yeah. So we are currently sitting in a section of our playground. It's cordoned off, but it's going to be Transformed quite soon.

And this is going to be the site of where we have the hospital field, Chelsea Garden, when it returns from Chelsea.

How exciting is that?

It's amazing. I still can't really believe it's happening. It's a bit of a pinch me moment.

We're incredibly excited about it and so happy that we have this amazing opportunity.

So describe this space for me now.

Yeah. So at this moment in time, we have got a no longer used chicken coop because we have our new chicken coop.

We've got some beautiful apple trees that are still blossoming in a little way. We have got a bug hotel behind us. We've got bird feeders and we've got a big palette sort of flower box behind us as well.

That just looks wonderfully wild at the moment. Yeah. And we're sat next to the pond, so it's gonna change massively. But it's just so exciting.

How do you envisage it in a few months time? What will it look like?

So, well, I think where we're sitting just now will be somewhere in between a dune. Yeah. So I think it's. It's hopefully going to be reminiscent of the sand dunes just down the road from us down at the coast. Yeah.

And we've got that wonderful bothy going in as well. That'll be used as a little artist studio. And just surrounded by beautiful plants and sand. It's going to be amazing.

Nigel's initial design was of a tall white structure which could have been mistaken for an ivory tower, which we thought was probably not the greatest thing. So we, we sort of went through lots of things and I said, well, have you looked at this? And you maybe look at that and that's interesting.

And.

And he designed something which I think they found that they just couldn't build. You know, financially, it was just too much of a challenge for the budget.

So Bobby Niven is an artist designer and he has three different things going on. Sometimes he's commissioned to make these little buildings that he would call his own artist practice, his own artistic practice.

Then he has a thing called the Bothy Project, which is where he's designed and built both. He's in very remote, remote parts of Scotland where you can go and do a residency and be part of the nature, mostly off grid. And then this is Bothy.

Bothy Stores where he's producing these little studios that you can buy. And he's worked with an engineer to make sure that you can just make. He can make them in his workshop. They're absolutely beautifully finished.

Beautifully designed, insulated, little. You can have a little wood burning stove in there if you want to. You know, they're actually very beautiful things.

So, yes, that's this little bothy in the middle, little studio, the craft studio in the. In the centre of Nigel's garden does represent that opportunity to be in the garden thinking and making and writing and. And that's.

That does replicate, in some sense, small model way what hospital field is. I'm sure Rachel described to you that they are a resource school. They work with lots of young children that learn differently.

And so that is a really, really important part of the expanded curriculum that they employ to support all the kids. Those multiple orientation, you know, lots and lots. They've all got lots and lots of different ways of seeing the world.

And of course, creativity is one of the most important ways of getting them to learn. And so that is now a new adventure for us to work with Lady Lone School and their outside learning culture. And we can maybe bring artists in.

And so we have one lovely project which we would hope would be the first, where Rachel said, well, you know, some of our teachers, they don't really like outside learning because they're scared of the runners.

And that's an expression that all primary school teachers use, which is when they go out, they always often have one child who might run, you know, run off, and that they live in fear of doing anything outside in case that might happen. It might happen once in five years.

But it's an apocryphal kind of story that everybody's terrified of because it is a dreadful thing if a child runs away and gets into difficulty. So this is their reluctance to. It's a barrier to their outside learning. And I said, well, what about if we make some stools?

And every child has a little stool, their own little stool even. And we gave that as an idea to an amazing artist called Katie Schwab, who we've been working with for quite a long time.

And she and her collaborator, who's a furniture maker, have written this project where they will go on the beach with the kids and pick up all the flots and jetson and they will design these little stools made from objects from the beach.

And then Simon will go away and carve them out of the wood, timber that we've been seasoning on the site here that came from the trees that we felled. So this is a lovely. It's a lovely project.

And then all those little bottoms will sit on all those little stools and there'll be an incentive not to run. And maybe also there'll be greater confidence from the teachers. So it's.

What we want to do is to listen and solve problems creatively, and I think this garden can be a fantastic location to do that.

My dissertation, I actually looked at how the creative arts could be better implemented into the Scottish curriculum. And I think that's. It's one of my passions. So being able to be part of, in just some small way, a project like this is really special to me.

It's sort of what I stand for and what my goals within my career really align to.

So what's your vision for the bothy.

When it returns to us? So I really hope that we can create our own little artist studio in there.

I've already been talking to some of the kids about it, how they envision it, and they were saying, like, oh, so all the kids that are really good at art could come in here and they could do that. But I think that's what we were talking about. But not everyone likes art, necessarily, but everyone can produce art in some way.

So I think it really needs to be somewhere that the kids want to come to make and create and don't feel bound by it having to be perfect. And it's a place of, hopefully, experimentation and they can just express themselves in a different way there.

I think, particularly for some of our children that find it difficult to express themselves, I hope that it's almost a little bit like a sanctuary for them, that they feel they can do that there.

And how does nature feed into that, do you think? What do you see when you see the children outside? You've clearly got. Already put a lot of thought to this school.

It's into incorporating the natural world into the children's curriculum.

Yeah.

So I think just giving them the opportunity to be out in nature and to explore it as well, and I think it's really important for the kids and it's something they really enjoy. Even a few years ago, I don't think they were as confident even coming out into the grounds. And, like, maybe just.

Even just the way they interacted with plants, we were maybe not as considerate towards plants. However, that's definitely shifted now.

They love coming outside for outdoor learning and planting and in their polytunnel, as you've seen, we've got lots of vegetables that have been grown over time. And, yeah, I just think it's.

It's a fantastic place for them to be and it's really important that they have that opportunity, especially if they don't have that at home, if you don't have a garden space, it's somewhere that we hope the garden can be for our pupils, but also for our wider community as well. Like their families, too, needs to be somewhere that they want to spend time.

I've done a couple of episodes where we've talked about the curriculum. It's hoped for GCSE in natural history, but also how you find time in the curriculum at the primary level to incorporate nature.

I mean, is it difficult to do that?

I think there's more and more that's included in the curriculum, especially nowadays, but I think it's not thinking about learning outdoors as something that sits separately to the rest of the curriculum. It's thinking about how you can teach literacy, numeracy, art, design, outside in nature and how you utilise that.

Because there's resources all around us. It doesn't necessarily need to be like paper and pencils and calculators and whatnot. But, yeah, I think.

I think we have to think about it in more of, like, a holistic way and it being interdisciplinary. So you're really thinking about. You're not just wedging in as something that stands alone. It really is part of the learning.

It's part of what we do day to day.

Do you see real differences when children have spent time outside?

Yes, majorly so. It's inevitable that this generation and future ones are going to be even more reliant on digital technology.

And it has major advantages, but also disadvantages. And I think that's where being outside really counterplays that as well. It sort of balances that out there.

Yeah, I think sometimes that we might be reluctant at taking learners outdoors and there's always that bit of. You're not really sure, especially if you're not as used to doing it, going outdoors for learning, that you maybe don't have that confidence.

You're not sure how the learners will react to being outside in a different space, whether they'll run off and not listen to your instructions. But I've always found in. We've all spoken about it in school, how actually it has a different impact. It allows them to have that freedom still.

But they do concentrate and they are interacting, interacted in what they're doing. They're really interested in that.

As sometimes sitting in a classroom between four walls, it can be a bit stifling, especially if you're thinking about things like for imagination and. Yeah. Getting outside and exploring and looking at bugs or weeds and. Yeah, it just provides so many learning opportunities, really.

But I think as well, like digital learning and technology like can coexist with nature.

Any Chelsea Garden is months and months in the planning and preparation. So I asked Lucy if she'd enjoyed the process.

I have. I'm now enjoying it more because it's. All the discussion is over.

It's taken me a lot to work out because, you know, there's also the RHS and those mechanisms that I don't understand anything about or what, you know, when the judging, it's still a judge, you know, that's an important thing for the. For the garden signers. You know, I don't understand what the rules of that are. So I absolutely can't get involved in any of that.

I just wanted to insert some artists in there. So I'm enjoying the fact that not Nigel is enjoying getting to know Bob and Roberta Smith. Patrick Brill, that's his pseudonym.

He's installing his studio into that studio.

And his practice is really activist around, gently activist around the importance of everybody's access to culture, everybody having access to creativity. Everybody can be an artist, everybody can create, everybody can make. And it makes the world a better place.

And he's still stood for Parliament against Michael Gove. When Michael Gove was education minister, worked on all the hustings.

But he always makes everything quite humorous for that mainstream audience that the show attracts. So he couldn't. For me, he's the absolute best artist to be able to be in that situation.

And then I gradually learned that the plant list is the everybody's go to thing. All the visitors need the plant list. And Nigel's extremely generous always.

He never, ever holds back with the plant lists because he's on his own mission of activism to get everybody to plant like he does. So we've asked the artist, Lucy Scare to design the plant list and she has produced a beautiful drawing for one side of it.

And then she's worked with scrutener and a movie amazing designer Rachel Adams. Her design practice is called Scrutineer to do the typography on the rear.

So everybody will be given and take home this really beautiful artist's edition. And some of which a small number will have been printed onto this very special paper, as much as we could possibly afford.

And the rest has been printed onto Amour ubiquitous paper. But it's still a lovely thing, whatever copy you get.

And then we have this other layer using the sort of workings of the show, which is this sort of invigilation, we would call that invigilation in our world, the sort of personing the Peopling of the garden. We invited all artists who've been to Hospital Field and art.

Some of our volunteers, we put out a call to see if people would give their time because we had to ask them to give it. And over 100 people said that they would help.

We've chosen about 30 and they will come to half a day and talk to the public about their experience of Hospital Field. So it makes this really nice connection.

So they're speaking about their own personal experience of Hospital Field and what it meant for them, what could be.

That's lovely.

So we've tried to use the mechanisms of Chelsea rather than to try and push and pull and try and change it. Try to use that in a way.

That works for us so it tells your story.

Yeah. So all those different people, very different.

You know the Rohana Zaman who teaches at Goldsmiths, She's a really extraordinary artist who won Giawood Prize last year to one of our garden volunteers or our amazing poet who lives up the road here, Very well known in her profession in Scotland as a. As a writer, but she's also our beekeeper. So she keeps her bees on the site here. So she's really looking forward to.

And she's going to have a little poem tucked up her sleeve just in case there's a moment for her to do a performance in the garden. And she has this beautiful way of reading her poetry. And her poems are all around the North Sea.

And so that idea of transposing the North Sea into that garden and everybody being quiet for a moment, everybody, please be quiet. Leslie Harrison is about to give her poem about a whale in the North Sea. It would be very beautiful if we're able to achieve that. So all those.

All that. I'm very grateful to all those people and that's what I'm looking forward to now.

I'm looking forward to how we animate and how we people that place and engage people in our story.

It's fantastic. It's really interesting just seeing these concepts come to life. And now that Bob and Roberto Smith, he's actually put studio into the bothy as well.

It's just. It makes it feel even more real and just gives it that real purpose of, yeah, this is actually what it's going to be used for.

And it starts to make us think about how we'll use it here as well when it returns. I'm so passionate about it because I think creativity, the arts and nature just go hand in hand.

It's something that isn't always valued within the curriculum, I think, starting to become more recognised and it's definitely something that there is more of a push looking at sustainability. But as I say, like, these things go creativity, the arts, sustainability, all go hand in hand.

I just love that slogan that Bob and Roberta Smith says he's got.

The gardens are the new art galleries, because I think it's so true that they're just such wonderfully beautiful places that we don't need to be inside for them. We can just go out and see beauty around us.

So for one week, the garden will live in London and thousands of people will stand in front of it and millions will see it on the television coverage of this most famous of flower shows. And then it'll be packed up on lorries and travel the 450 miles to that Scotland school playground by the sea in Arbroath.

I ask Nigel Dunnett what he is most excited for when his creation goes to Lady Lone.

I think to see it adapted to a real situation. So the show garden is very special. We're doing things to create something within a few weeks that's going to last for one week for the show.

When it goes to Lady Lone, it's going to have to work for real. So I think it's working through the particular planting, how to simplify it, how it's going to change, how it's going to evolve.

And the way I like to see it, really, is that we're providing a sort of framework for the school and for hospital field to work with.

But as a designer, I'm not saying, oh, it's got to stay like this, or I put that plant there, or it's a plan for that plant to go there, therefore it's got to be be like that. I think it's a starting point for them to evolve it however they want.

So I think that will be the exciting thing and I think it's quite artistic, really, to maybe at this point not know exactly how it's going to turn out, but provide the opportunities for those involved in using it to develop it themselves in whatever way happens to be the way that works for them.

We will come back to this garden, but do go to the website ourplantstories.com to see photographs from my travels to our growth and Chelsea. Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.