McCarthy & Stone have enlisted award winning garden designer Chris Beardshaw ( pictured) to create an original and striking conceptual installation during the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show which will capture the positivity behind the aging process, whilst honouring the experiences and knowledge offered by the UK’s growing aging population.
Intended to be thought provoking and interactive, the garden will allow visitors to journey through it and to hear specially recorded audio stories from people in their later life that will be captured online through a social media campaign being run on McCarthy & Stone’s Facebook page.
Chris Beardshaw explains: “The audio within the design is a key element in my concept for the garden as I wanted people to be able to engage with the garden in a way that is rarely possible in a show garden. This is after all no ordinary garden, as the essential ingredients are being provided by those celebrating their later life.
“As part of the concept, we’ve broad divided later life into three areas, the first being one of life’s experiences – all those events that have influenced who you are and how you’ve lived your life. The second is of technological advancements – the things you have seen that have revolutionised the contemporary world, and the third is the fashions or trends, that you’ve perhaps rebuffed or even followed. We want to collect all of your stories and hear you enthusing in your own words, then we can use these tales as a catalyst for the direction of the garden.”
www.mccarthyandstone.co.uk
McCarthy & Stone are one of Britain’s leading providers of retirement apartments, pioneering the concept of purpose-built accommodation for older people. They provide 70% of this type of accommodation, having built more than 45,000 apartments in 1,000 different schemes.