Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres and NHS Tayside recently broke ground on a remarkable new landscape design at Ninewells Hospital Dundee.

The inspiring new design has been created by the internationally acclaimed, five-times Chelsea Flower Show gold-winner Arabella Lennox-Boyd. It will complement the spectacular Frank Gehry-designed building and has been kindly donated by Arabella and funded by the generous support of local families, NHS Tayside and the in-kind support of Project Management Scotland. The Garden will be used by visitors to both the Hospital and Maggie’s.

Nigel Cayzer, Maggie’s Chairman, said: “Arabella’s landscape design for Maggie’s is great news for people visiting both Maggie’s and Ninewells Hospital and it is thanks to a unique partnership with NHS Tayside and our dedicated army of local supporters that this has been made possible. We are also most appreciative to be gifted this design by Arabella.”

Arabella Lennox-Boyd said: “Maggie Keswick Jencks was herself a wonderful landscape designer and her original blueprint for the centres placed great emphasis on the role of the landscape and outdoor space in creating a relaxing  environment with the emphasis on stress reduction and healing. I am delighted to have been involved in such a moving and worthwhile project, combining excellence in design with the best of the human spirit.

“Our masterplan for Maggie’s aims to set  this incredible building better in its landscape whilst also linking it both visually and physically to the Hospital. Dramatic, stepped earthworks mound around a new 33m diameter labyrinth that visually links the hospital to Maggie’s. This area provides a contemplative space and its amphitheatre-like banks enclose what will also be an area for events held by both the hospital and the local community. A separate small garden, planted with flowering shrubs and roses, can be used as an additional outside room for patients and their families. I have swathed ivy and dramatic grasses around the building itself whilst in the wider landscape, azaleas and rhododendrons will provide a mass of colour combined with many native Scottish species and flowering trees. The earthworks also screen discrete car parking and disabled, ambulance and helicopter access whilst new pathways, with improved lighting, link the buildings more easily. The aim was to create a landscape which was visually exciting and also provided a publicly accessible amenity of lasting value. Low maintenance was also an important priority.”

Other local supporters include the Mason family. Douglas Mason, a keen gardener who died of cancer in 2005 left a legacy of £50,000 towards Maggie’s Dundee landscape design. 

His brother Kenneth Mason has said: “Douglas felt wonderful outdoor spaces were phenomenally nurturing places for himself and other people with cancer to spend time away from the hospital. He valued the support he received from Maggie’s Dundee but wanted to do more to ensure others with cancer had the chance to enjoy the outdoor surroundings as much as he had near the end of his life. He also wanted to make access between Maggie’s and the hospital more direct and this landscape design will do that.”

Community Fundraiser Valerie Busher said: “On behalf of everyone at Maggie's, both staff and visitors, I would like to offer sincere thanks for the fantastic support that has been given to this project. I look forward to its completion and the marvellous benefits that will be gained from having this wonderful facility for visitors to Maggie's and Ninewells Hospital to use.”

Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres
A Maggie’s Centre is a welcoming, friendly and non-institutional place, adjacent to a cancer treatment hospital, which provides support for people with any kind of cancer, their families, friends and carers. Maggie’s supports people from the moment they ask for help, free of charge, and unconditionally for as long as they wish.
 
Maggie's Centres are the vision of our founder, Maggie Keswick Jencks, who was herself a cancer patient, was to provide a ‘home from home’ environment alongside major cancer treatment hospitals, where patients and families could regain a sense of control over their lives during the shock and stress of diagnosis and treatment.

Each new Centre is built to a unique design in order to create an uplifting, inspiring atmosphere, using natural light, décor, art and furnishing to reduce stress levels and promote a sense of healing and well-being. Maggie’s has been privileged to work with some of the world’s leading architects in setting up existing and planned Centres, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Murphy and Page and Park.
 
The first Centre opened at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh in 1996, shortly after Maggie’s death. There are now five Centres open in Scotland.  Maggie's Lanarkshire Centre is also in the pipeline and an interim service is being launched at Wishaw General Hospital in early 2008. 

Maggie's Centres work in partnership with the National Health Service and other cancer charities. The clinical staff responsible for day-to-day treatment and care trust Maggie’s to provide a genuinely complementary service, additional to that provided by the NHS.

Maggie’s Dundee
Launched in September 2003, Maggie’s Dundee was the third Maggie’s Centre to open, following those in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Maggie’s pioneering programme of information, psychological support, stress management and practical help in areas such as nutrition and welfare benefits is delivered by a small team of professional staff, including Cancer Nurse Specialists and Clinical Psychologists with experience of both group and individual counselling. It also incorporates informal drop-in support, short courses and workshops such as ‘Living with Cancer’, and ‘Look Good, Feel Better’. Expert sessional staff delivers other elements of the programme, such as tai chi, meditation, and nutrition.

The work Maggie’s does is complementary to, and fully supported by, health professionals in the host hospitals. The service is available to patients, carers and family members, unconditionally and free of charge. No referral from a health professional is required, although we enjoy excellent working relationships with staff in our NHS partners, who are often instrumental in encouraging visitors to drop in for the first time.

The Dundee Centre is housed in the first and only UK building designed by world-renowned US architect, Frank Gehry, a close friend of our late founder Maggie Keswick Jencks and her husband Charles Jencks. The design of the building attracted much critical acclaim nationally and internationally, not least with the award of the 2004 Royal Fine Arts Commission/BSkyB Building of the Year prize, contributing to the social and cultural regeneration of Dundee.

Since opening, the Centre has gone from strength to strength, with over 10,000 visits recorded in 2006, a 45% increase on the previous year. This growth continued into 2007, with 14,500 visits being made.  Maggie’s believe that in excess of 50% of those diagnosed with cancer from the Tayside region use the Centre at least once.

Every year, Maggie’s collects quantitative and qualitative feedback from a sample of our Centre users. Respondents are invited to rate their overall experience of Maggie’s, as well as individual programme components, on a five-point scale ranging from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’. The most recent feedback on Dundee has been overwhelmingly positive, with 92% of respondents describing the service as excellent, and 8% as good. Around two thirds of visitors make return/multiple visits.

Arabella Lennox-Boyd
Of Italian birth, Arabella Lennox-Boyd left her native Rome to settle in England, and has been a landscape designer for the past twenty years. She has undertaken many commissions, ranging from small town gardens to large historical country landscapes. Among the large projects she has designed are the National Trust garden at Ascott House, a Roof Garden for a commercial building in the City, No 1 Poultry, in Newcastle and Hong Kong, the gardens at Eaton Hall, Cheshire and a garden and park in Dallas, Texas. Her overseas projects have been in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Mexico, Barbados, Canada and the USA. She has also designed 5 Gold Medal winning gardens for the Chelsea Flower Show, including a Best Garden Award in 1998.
Arabella Lennox-Boyd’s public appointments in landscape and horticulture are as follows: she served as a Trustee of Kew Gardens for 9 years and was a member of the Historic Parks and Gardens Panel of English Heritage.  She is currently a Trustee of Castle Howard Arboretum Trust, a patron of both Painshill Park Trust and the Martin McLaren Horticultural Scholarship and a member of the RHS Floral B Committee. She also sat on the Heritage panel of judges for six contemporary Heritage gardens.  She has written three books, ‘Traditional English Gardens’, ‘Private Gardens of London’, and in May 2002 published a book on her work, ‘Designing Gardens’. She has lectured on her work in the UK, Italy and the USA and has been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Design (HonDDes) by the University of Greenwich where she is also a member of The University of Greenwich Assembly. In addition, Arabella has been awarded the prestigious “Premio Firenze Donna” prize in Italy, for her outstanding achievements as both a landscape architect and business-woman.  Also recently, Arabella has been awarded the celebrated Torsanlorenzo International Prestige Prize 2007, in recognition of her lifelong commitment to innovation in design & to championing green spaces.

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