Crime & Cure: The Glasshouse Garden

Because 'Crime & Prune-ishment' would be in bad taste

[ Post too long for email. Very long. Many photos. Please savour each one. ]

When I was at the Bar I volunteered to do pro bono work for Not Beyond Redemption representing incarcerated mothers in Children Act proceedings. I also undertook public family law work; cases brought to court by Local Authorities seeking court orders to safeguard children.

Every part of our system is broken. It is part of why I found my job unbearable. Whether our courts, policing, social work, or our penal system, we are stuck in a Victorian nightmare that we know does not work. It doesn’t work. But it is easier for politicians to sell ‘tough on crime’ than to put together reforms that take into account everything we know now.

What do we know now that we didn’t know when these systems began? We know more about mental health. We know more about the impacts of poverty. We know more about behavioural patterns. We know more about trauma and abuse. We know more about therapeutic resources. We know more about the impact of family breakdown. We know more about the science of addiction. We know more about learning disabilities. We know more about personality disorders. We know more about recidivism. We know more about illiteracy. We know more about financial education. We know more about intimate partner violence. We know more about restorative justice.

There is almost nothing that we do not know more about now than was known when these systems began.

And, we know more about what actually works to change things.

If you have read Sue Stuart-Smith’s ‘The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World’ (and really if you haven’t, why not? I’ve told you so many times) you already know about the numerous clinical studies demonstrating the effectiveness of nature - and (broadly speaking) horticulture - as cure.

From my own writing you know that I am proof of its effectiveness in treating depression and anxiety (or, eurgh I know, ‘burn out’).

The work of The Glasshouse offers yet more proof of the almost magical impact of the almost-too-simple curative effects of nature.

The Glasshouse operates out of East Sutton Park prison for women. They offer horticultural training and employment - even housing - to those making the difficult transition out of custody after a period of imprisonment. The Glasshouse users have a ZERO PERCENT reoffending rate.

Listening to Jo Thompson talk about her work with The Glasshouse has made me even more proud to know her. She has been a phenomenal advocate throughout her Chelsea press engagements both for the charity’s work, and for the humanity of the women it helps.

While I find it un-fucking-believable that Jo is the only female designer of a large show garden at RHS Chelsea this year (what the absolute fuck, seriously) it also is clear that she not only understood her brief (‘create a garden’) but deeply understood the women whose ideas the garden represents.

The garden had a depth and a generosity that was missing from every other garden at the show this year. I liked the other gardens, don’t get me wrong (most of them anyway) but I was moved by Jo’s. It is rich. It is abundant. It is the opposite of a concrete cell. The cell inspires nothing. But in the world Jo and her team have made - lush, and tactile, and soft - one cannot help but dream.

I hope you pay close attention to the photographs you see of the team’s work, both here and wherever else you see it, because the level of detail is absolutely staggering. This is not just gardening, this is artistry.

I am so glad for Jo’s garden. Not only because seeing it was a feast for my soul, but also because it has introduced me to the work of this fantastic charity.

As well as The Glasshouse and Not Beyond Redemption, I also want to mention one other charity worth your attention: Become.

Become provides support to children and young people in the care system, and to care leavers. They need all the support and help they can get.

And with that, here is the actual garden, as documented in almost excessive detail for you by me…

Jo very generously let me slip behind the rope to take some pictures of the garden for you. When I was still there sometime later documenting every petal she must have thought me deranged. But really. Such combinations of plants you have never seen. Such a lived in garden, created in just a month, you have never seen. And good luck trying to get your hands on a Rosa ‘Wild Rover’ now - I know. I’ve tried.

I was staggered that in the rest of the show gardens I spotted only one that had included a rose. Ok, I think it had two roses, but still. WHAT. WHAT. Here the roses plumped and spilled abundantly, just as they should in any garden. But these are not your grandmother’s roses. Fat, bursting-at-the-seams, thick, heavy blooms hung in deep, wine reds which - in combination with the deep mahogany of Iris Germanica ‘Sultan’s Palace’ - made the planting rich and deep and sensual.

The biggest hit, though? Nicotiana x hybida ‘Tinkerbell’. As I stood taking photos almost every person (hordes) commented on it. Sadly for all of us, it is pretty late in the season to grow from seed, but you can bet it’ll be at the top of my ‘seeds to sow’ list in 2026. See also: delphinium x ruysii ‘Pink Sensation’ which, all on its own, was more interesting than every plant in every other garden in the whole rest of the show.

Between the ‘Tinkerbell’ and the babbling rill (the origin of which was at the back of the glasshouse issuing from a bank of ferns and mind-your-own-business that you would have sworn had been there since the jurassic) flowing under the steps of the glass structure and down to a pool at the bottom of the garden, you just know that the fairies Jo (famously) wrote about in her book are thrilled with the garden, too. Tonnes of whimsey.

And what about romance, Jo’s whole aesthetic and ethos? It was everywhere - in the myosotis scorpioides sprinkled by the water, in the texture of the betula nigra’s peeling bark, in the thrown-open doors of the glass house. But mostly in the abundance and the generosity of the garden - as if Flora and Fauna had themselves designed a garden to celebrate the fecundity and nourishment of sisterhood.

View the full plant list here. Take careful notes.

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