How a Chelsea Pensioner created his own secret garden in the grounds of the Royal Hospital
Just metres from the teams in high-vis conjuring showstoppers for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Warrant Officer (WO1) Archie Ferguson, a resident of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, stoops to point out the unfurling stems of a begonia in a bucket.
“Look, they’re just pushing through,” the 86-year-old says with a skip in his voice. “I left it in here to overwinter and I didn’t know if it would come back.” His smile lifts the soft folds of his round, tanned face. “They’re going to be a gorgeous pink. They’ve sat in the dark quietly and now they are back. A resurrection,” he adds.
I dare to suggest that some people think begonias old-fashioned these days. Ferguson shrugs. “My wife loved them,” he says, simply. “I look at them, dahlias and red roses, her favourites, and she is there.”
Ferguson is bracing for the Flower Show’s hubbub, but he’ll enjoy nipping next door and taking in the picture-perfect medal winners and flawless specimens. In their rose-red coats, the Chelsea Pensioners become an additional feature of the show.
Yet in their own quarters, albeit quietly and a little less pristinely, the magic of spring gardening is uncoiling, too. On a smaller scale, its meaning and purpose is all here.
We sip tea in Ferguson’s “secret garden”. When he arrived two years ago, grieving for his wife of 64 years, Jennifer, who passed away in October 2021 10 years after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, the garden was a concrete alley, ignored and dominated by an ugly air-conditioning unit.
There are raised beds and allotments at the Hospital, but there wasn’t one free for lifelong gardener Ferguson, so staff asked if he might like to make the alley his own. He made paradise.
He taps his head. This is where he designs, he explains, rather than putting pencil to paper. Astroturf was unrolled like a rug, and scores of troughs and pots were clustered down the sides to create borders, sometimes two or three deep. A jungle of pelargoniums brush our calves as we walk between them, releasing a heavy scent.
The space is small, but Ferguson intentionally crowds it. He initially wanted trees down the middle, but that was deemed a hazard. Instead, an almond tree is trained horizontally along one wall. An apple and pear stand to attention on either side. A plum sits in one corner, an irreverent herb robert at its base, and a fig, already heavy with three fruits, in another.
A rose, its buds flushed red, and a young wisteria, are starting to cling across trellis erected to cover the air-conditioning unit. Lobelia and alyssum will be joining geraniums under the rose for a red, white and blue theme. “I’m quite patriotic,” Ferguson grins.
Today, the stars are the wallflowers, which dance like flames, popping alongside magenta and scarlet pelargonium flowers. (Ferguson doesn’t know which varieties he grows: “I forget, these days”.) Tomatoes and beans will join soon, he says: “I like to mix it all in, make it jungley.”
Ferguson, who is from Cambridgeshire, initially hesitated to move to the Royal Hospital because he dreaded life without a garden. Even during his army career with the Royal Anglian Regiment, he had one in his married quarters: after stints training in the real-life jungles of Kenya, he’d find groundedness coming home to it.
As a lad growing up after the war near Wolverhampton, for him, gardening was a “way of life”. “We had a long strip, all vegetables,” he recalls. “I did the digging and weeding for my father. We were all growing for eating then. The magic moment for me was planting a bean and knowing it would go in the dark and then come up.”
On cue, he pulls a rustley packet of runner bean seeds from his bag like sweets – he popped a few in the ground earlier. “Look,” he says, like Jack, holding up a mottled purple oval. “There’s life in there.” Ferguson has a rich faith, and gardening is part of it.
It was because of Jennifer that he fell for flowers. “I loved to pick her a bouquet,” he says. For St David’s Day, it was daffodils, because she was Welsh. He suddenly begins to cry, his whole body shaking. All around us, tubs are filled with the wilting foliage of this year’s daffs.
Ferguson even made a garden on the canal boat that he and Jennifer lived on in retirement. When Jennifer developed Alzheimer’s they moved to a house in Cambridge, and their small front garden became a godsend. When the disease made her agitated, the garden was balm.
“She would plant seeds and pick flowers; it was about purpose,” Ferguson explains. “She would say to the foxglove, ‘It’s lovely to have you back again’. She became more relaxed.”
This garden is healing Ferguson. He comes here to think, meditate and pray. It is also a space to meet new friends, who come to chat, garden or simply sit. “That’s my drinks cabinet,” he smiles, pointing to a stool with a lid.
“Men are not that good at talking, but people open up here.” One new friend is Lieutenant Alan Rutter, his “apprentice gardener”. Rutter, 76, helps him with the heavy lifting of the bags of compost – from Buckingham Palace, no less.
“I’m learning,” says Rutter. “I can say words like perennial now. There’s something about gardening – side by side, it’s easier to talk.”
The sign Ferguson has playfully erected here with the names of military tours is designed to prompt recollections and conversation.
Last September, the Hospital asked if he would create another garden of pots on the terrace of the Campbell Ward, where 20 veterans live with dementia.
Ferguson takes me up in the lift, vital for hoisting royal compost. We weave through hushed residents and a cloying hospital smell, then out into another world. “I wanted a mini orchard,” Ferguson explains, leading me along alcoves of young fruit trees assembled around benches.
It’s stunningly incongruous. There’s Victoria plum, cherry ‘Summer Sun’, apple ‘Christmas Pippin’, peach ‘Duke of York’; the names go on. (Helpfully, he’s left the labels in here.)
Memory is key. “Different fruits have different connotations with yesteryear,” he explains. “I’m hoping they will prompt memories for the residents.”
His potted “privet hedge” has already done it. “Someone came up to me and said, ‘We had a privet hedge like that as kids,” he recalls. He has invited residents’ families to bring meaningful plants from home, such as a rose given for a golden wedding and herbs once used for cooking.
A care assistant walks past with a tiny lady using a frame. Only that morning the lady talked her through flower names. “I had no idea she knew,” she says.
Ferguson hopes the residents will find peace in the garden, as Jennifer did. “I’ve seen smiles,” he says.
Gardening creates community at Chelsea. Sergeant Barbara Whilds, 80, resident here for 13 years, has an allotment and raised bed, and is famous for her desert grape vines. “I have a bunch every day,” she says, urging me to ignore the weeds. A former psychiatric nurse in the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps (QARANC), she understands the healing power of gardening. “It’s about life carrying on,” she explains.
Next to her asparagus sprouting bountifully like aliens’ fingers, Sergeant David Hards, 77, shows me the living willow teepees he has created in his raised bed for beans. “I saw it on YouTube,” he explains, his tattooed knuckles raking the earth.
He came here nine months ago after losing his wife, son and sister. It has been a dark time, but gardening is helping. “Look at this,” he gestures. “What more do you want?”
He has chatted with Ferguson in the Secret Garden, too. As Ferguson puts it, sitting there amid the plants “feeds our souls after supper”.
Archie Ferguson’s five favourite plants
Almond tree
“It brings the first blossom after a long, dark winter.”
Dahlias
“They are the last of the flowers and can provide colour into October or even November.”
Begonias
“I don’t care if they’re old-fashioned, you have them in flower for two months and I love them”.
Tomatoes
“They’re great in a pot or a small garden and there’s nothing like the taste.”
Geraniums
“For the colour, but also the scent of the leaves when you brush them is incredible.”
