Garden of Angels
June 21, 2019
Candover attended and sponsored the Hampshire Medical Fund’s annual Hampshire Country and Garden Festival on Sunday 9th June at Bere Mill, Whitchurch. We attend the event to support the Hampshire Medical Fund in raising valuable funds for the Trust and to raise awareness of Candover Clinic. As you entered the festival you were welcomed by the ‘Garden of Angels’, designed by Tania Brookes, a Hampshire based gardener, the garden was designed to represent the mutually supportive relationship between two elements of healthcare provision within Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: The NHS and privately funded services.
Candover Clinic is the embodiment of private healthcare provision at Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital. Built by the Trust as a long-term investment to generate additional funding to support the Trust’s NHS services, Candover Clinic works side-by-side with the NHS to offer high quality clinical services to the Basingstoke and wider community. All funds generated by Candover from private activities are used to directly finance NHS needs such as nurses, equipment and infrastructure.
The left hand garden in blue and white represents the NHS, using its logo colours as basis for planting. The right hand side reflects the corporate colours of Candover Clinic. Where the two gardens come together and overlap we find Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ representing nurses that have been funded by this collaboration and a tree which emphasises the growing strength of the joint relationship. The overall shape of the garden beds is based on a simple graphic representation of an angel. This links to both the idiomatic use of the word angel to mean a nurse and to the definition of an angel as a financial backer. The garden also provided a point of rest in the form of a bench that was engraved to show the unity between Candover Clinic and the Trust. The bench can now be seen on display as a permanent fixture in our inner garden at Candover Clinic commentating Candover’s establishment and mission.