The Tranquillity Garden at QMC (Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham) is a peaceful, accessible green space for patients, staff, and visitors, designed by award winning Jo Thompson with support from The 11 Foundation and Nottingham Hospitals Charity. The garden offers a place for rest, reflection, and nature, located near the tram stop by Hipp's Café, and opposite the Treatment Centre. It is a well used space by patients, staff, students and visitor to the hospital.

There are currently 7 volunteer gardeners who look after the space. We visit around 6 times a year to keep it tip top. Most of us have some link to QMC - a couple of us have received life changing treatment here. The clinicians at QMC have also supported some of our friends and relatives over the years so keeping the garden beautiful is our way of paying back. Some of us also just like gardening!

We always get lovely comments when we are out in the garden, and the garden is a well-used resource - sometimes staff just need a bit of time out and a seat somewhere quiet, sometimes it's a patient and their carer having a catch up or a group of students having lunch. There is always someone using the space. You may have heard about our resident corvid (Russell Crowe) who has been known to be very protective of the birch tree, dive bombing visitors to the point where they had to close off the path! He made the BBC news last year.

The garden has been in place for over five years now and was overdue a refresh of some of the planting! We raised an initial £500 and have spent this on some new plants - asters, echinops and eryngium for year-round colour and structure, new grasses, mid height verbena and thalictrum. We also received a generous donation of plants from Bagthorpe Plants. We have spent our last few sessions reducing down the anemone, geranium and spring snowflake that was taking over the space in order to make room for our new planting that has now gone in. We have also bought a handful of new tools, trugs and a wheelbarrow. We are applying for more funding now to:

- Add bins/recycling bins to the space (we spend some of our sessions litter picking because there are no bins in the garden)

- Signage for around the hospital - particularly in the long stay wards so people are aware of the garden and know how to find it and can make use of the space

- More tools and plants - we are still missing a few larger tools - forks, rakes, spades and a good pruner - we would also like to put some pittosporum in to replace the poorly ilex balls

- A really good hose! The irrigation that was put in initially does not work (despite our best efforts) so in order to keep our new plants alive we will need to be able to water

- focus on the wildlife garden area - adding more natives, bee posts and bug hotels to this space

Every little helps - please help us to keep this beautiful haven in lovely condition for the future.

Thanks for taking the time to visit this JustGiving page.