I’ve been working in Horatio’s Garden in Oswestry for an hour a week through the height of this hot summer.

Horatio’s Garden is a national charity creating and nurturing beautiful gardens in NHS spinal injury centres to support everyone affected by spinal injury. The gardens are there to support patients, their families and friends facing long stays in NHS hospitals as they adjust to, or care for someone with, a life-changing injury.

The garden is very beautiful, full of scented plants and climbers. It’s designed to be easily navigable by wheelchair, with shady alcoves where patients can spend time with family and visitors. I chat to people, share poems with them, and write poems based on our conversations. Spinal injury is a very traumatic event in a life, but this place is designed to offer some solace, and some time. I try to fit in with that.
In any quiet moments, I write poems about the space we’re in, and share those too.

Here’s a poem about bees I was watching on a bed of sunflowers yesterday.

SUNFLOWER BUDS

Small bee cat-furred and striped can’t leave
a vast dark sunflower six feet up
hoist in an August afternoon.

The bed’s flared yellow to toasted brown with
blood-red pincushions bee-beset. And leaned
on the heat come the folded spears of buds still green.