Chiswick Designer's Charity Garden to Feature at Chelsea Flower Show

Ruth Willmott will create a garden inspired by personal loss

Chsiwick-based designer Ruth Willmott will create a special garden for this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show celebrating the research into breast cancer funded by the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity.

Ruth lost her sister-in-law Angela to triple negative breast cancer in March 2014, and is working with Breakthrough to help raise donations to fund its resarch.

The garden will be based around a stone pathway shaped like a double helix DNA structure, and will include a number of references to breast cancer and the women who have to battle it. For example, water pools will ripple every 10 minutes to represent the shocking number of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK each day.

Ruth, who won a gold medal at the 2013 edition of the famous floral showcase, runs a landscape and garden design company from Heathfield Terrace in W4. Speaking recently, she talked about her personal experience of breast cancer, and how gardening has helped her come to terms with it: “Looking back now, one of the hardest aspects of the time period in which we were losing Angela was the feeling of being powerless to do anything to stop breast cancer taking her from us.

“For me, gardening and nature have such power to heal, and creating this garden with Breakthrough has felt like a form of positive action in the wake of something so tragic and bleak. This has enabled me to find a way to regain a sense of optimism and take back some of the control that we lost to breast cancer, by raising money for an organisation that has the capability to one day prevent other families losing the women they love.”

The Breakthrough Breast Cancer garden will exhibit in the Fresh Garden category at RHS Chelsea Flower Show, 19-23 May 2015. All the plants and trees used in the garden will be available to buy during the show week to raise funds for the charity.

Those not able to visit the show can buy a selection of the garden plants online at www.kelways.co.uk and donations to Breakthrough can also be made online via The Angela Willmott (1965-2014) Breakthrough Tribute Fund.

April 5, 2015