Gardens and Health Week 3-11 May 2025, celebrating 'Green Medicine'

Gardens and Health Week 3-11 May 2025, celebrating ‘Green Medicine’

Press release – Tuesday 29 April

The National Garden Scheme celebrates Gardens and Health Week 3-11 May, 2025
Green Medicine – gardens are good for us

The National Garden Scheme is celebrating all that’s good about gardens and encouraging everyone to embrace the positivity of green spaces as part of our annual Gardens and Health Week that runs from 3-11 May, 2025.

The charity, that has donated over £72 million to support nursing and health charities, including £3 million through its Gardens and Health Programme*, supports hundreds of people and projects from community gardens and horticultural therapy to gardens at Maggie’s and Horatio’s Garden, that demonstrate the importance of gardens for everyone’s health and wellbeing.

Commenting, National Garden Scheme Chief Executive, George Plumptre said: “We began our Gardens and Health programme in 2016 with the publication of the report, Gardens and Health: implications for policy and practice, commissioned from the leading health policy organisation The King’s Fund. As part of our ongoing commitment, we continue to champion, and increase our funding for, garden projects in health-care settings, and community gardens; areas that we believe are vital lifelines not just for our own health and wellbeing but also for the wider health of the planet.”

This year’s Gardens and Health Week is accompanied by the fifth edition of the interactive, digital publication The Little Yellow Book of Gardens and Health which brings the programme to life.

“This year our theme is ‘green medicine’ and through the various chapters the wonderfully varied and uplifting articles that they contain explore the different ways that gardens really can offer a viable and effective alternative to standard clinical responses to people’s health and wellbeing. In some instances, perhaps adults living with depression, lack of self-confidence or social isolation, or children with a troubled upbringing – all notoriously hard to overcome with a purely clinical response – gardens and gardening offer something unique which we still have fully to understand. The Little Yellow Book of Gardens and Health brings to life a range of experiences with incisive – and often uplifting – immediacy,” adds George Plumptre.

Along with personal stories and expert opinion from contributors including Dr Miriam Stoppard, Danny Clarke, Dame Laura Lee, Dr Susan Taheri, Hazel Gardiner and key nursing charities, the book explores the benefit of gardens and gardening for our own, and the planets, health.

“The richness and diversity of storytelling in The Little Yellow Book of Gardens and Health perfectly reflects the incredible variety of gardens that open for the National Garden Scheme, while showcasing everything that makes gardens and green spaces so important for everyone’s health and wellbeing” says National Garden Scheme Ambassador, gardener, television presenter and writer Rachel de Thame. She adds “Celebrating gardens is a celebration of life.”

You can read The Little Yellow Book of Gardens and Health here

* The National Garden Scheme’s Gardens and Health Programme, has seen the charity donate more than £3 million to a wide range of beneficiaries – a growing part of the £72 million we have donated since opening our gates in 1927. These are donations that we intend to build on in the coming years, not only funding more garden projects in healthcare settings but also in the community for the benefit of individuals and different groups enabling more people to have access to gardens and to discover the benefits they will find there.

Donations through the programme in 2024/25 include:

£122,227 to Maggie’s to support the creation of gardens at NHS cancer centre (a donation as part of an ongoing ten-year commitment)
£90,000 to Horatio’s Garden to help build gardens in all NHS Spinal Injury Units across the UK (a donation as part of a commitment to fund all 11 gardens)
£80,000 to ABF The Soldiers’ Charity for soldiers, veterans and their families supporting a variety of projects including promoting soldiers and veterans’ physical and mental wellbeing through the green environment, horticultural therapy and training, and other outdoors activities.
£25,000 to The Country Trust to support their Food Discovery Programme. This initiative provides hands-on food education for primary-aged children, helping them connect with the land, grow and cook their own produce; supporting their physical and mental wellbeing.
£294,260 in grants to 117 community garden projects across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.