Potted plants with lush green foliage and white flowers arranged along a sidewalk near a brick building with a black-framed window.
Raised brick garden beds with green plants and white flowers outside a red brick building with three white-framed windows.
Urban courtyard with brick buildings, rectangular planters with green plants, wooden benches, and trees.
Close-up of green fern leaves with detailed fronds.
Garden with white and purple flowers, green foliage, and stacked dark gray bricks.
A courtyard with benches, potted plants, and trees, surrounded by brick buildings, some with windows and a covered walkway above.

Subaru x Horatio’s Garden

South West Garden Extension 2026

Horatio’s Gardens are therapeutic gardens created within NHS spinal injury centres, offering patients, their families and staff access to nature, beauty and a place to rest, reflect and connect during periods of rehabilitation and recovery. Horatio’s Garden South West, Salisbury, was the first of the gardens, designed by, the esteemed, Cleve West and opened in 2012. Our extension sits alongside this much-loved original garden, but offers a deliberately different experience. Developed through focus groups with service users, the brief called for more enclosed spaces — places where people could find privacy, sit away from the main garden and spend time surrounded by planting.

The existing bank becomes part of the landscape, allowing the garden to gently spill into the courtyard. Seating is tucked between sculptural planters, creating a sequence of intimate spaces — places to sit alone, talk quietly or simply watch the garden grow.

The garden itself has a second life. Originally created as our award-winning Subaru Cocoon at RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival 2025, its elements have been redesigned and relocated to Salisbury, transformed from a temporary show garden into a permanent place of respite.

Planters are formed from reusing Kenoteq’s K-Briq, made from recycled construction waste, giving discarded material a new purpose. Their shifting heights bring planting within reach and view from wheelchair and bed height, while lime mortar allows the brickwork to be reused with minimal intervention.

Lush, layered temperate rainforest planting weaves through the courtyard, creating softness, shelter and a sense of being immersed in nature.

It is a garden shaped by listening, reuse and renewal — a forgotten space given a new life, and a garden given another.

Photography - Eva Nemeth