The Albert Place garden

“Beauty can be made or found,
Beauty is young but old,
Beauty is nature but man-made,
Beauty is everything but nothing…” Pete, September 2009

Albert Place is a project that supports people with mental health issues and with one in four people likely to experience a mental health problem, you realise how vital that support is.

Faced with a garden that was little more than a rubbish tip, residents Michael, Pete, Richard and Simon and staff decided to get to work to create a peaceful sanctuary that whether you like gardening or not, would be somewhere for people to enjoy and get away from it all.

Michael’s been at Albert Place for just over a year and although he’s always loved gardening, he never considered it as a career choice. Now he’s working toward an NVQ, volunteering at Glencarn garden centre and is the driving force behind the renovation of the garden. He also finds time to volunteer for Barnados.

Michael has an eye for detail. It’s what makes his work so good. Whether he’s choosing and planting flowers, helping to put up fences or laying decking, he has the ability to see what needs doing and how to do it, and then get stuck in to make sure the job gets done. But part of the success of the garden has been just how many people have helped out – from a few hours, to much more involved planting or hard landscaping. The next project is a gazebo built from scratch and you get the feeling it won’t stop there.

For Pete the journey has been even more unexpected from declaring he wanted nothing to do with the garden, he then visited a garden centre and was completely hooked! An author of several poems, he enjoys the sense of peace in the garden and feels it is definitely inspiration for his writing. “It’s therapeutic,” agrees Richard, “you do as much or as little as you want but when you’re working you get to forget everything else. The exercise is good and the results even better.” Simon thinks both the garden and the project are “brilliant” and help people get back on their feet.

The beauty of the garden – beyond the obvious of course – is that it’s ongoing. Long after the current residents leave, the garden will still exist and will need willing volunteers to keep it tidy, expand the planting or even take on more ambitious projects.

The staff are clear, for the length of time residents are at Albert Place, this is their home, but eventually everyone moves on to independent living. It’s just that now, many of them are also taking with them a passion for gardening…