Care Home wins best garden accolade

White Lodge Care Home in Braydon has been crowned winner of Garden of the Year 2021 at the Barchester Care awards for the Central Division.

The home is now through to the national round of judging, and will join winners from across the UK at a special awards event in October.

The Barchester Care Awards celebrate staff of the care home organisation who go the extra mile for the benefit of the 12,000 residents living in its 248 care homes and private hospitals across the country. 

Categories range from Carer of the Year to Dementia Care Champion and Activities Coordinator of the Year.

White Lodge general manager General Manager, Ramona Gherendi, said: “This is an amazing achievement and it has been about the whole home with staff and residents working together.  

"It has been wonderful to have the support of the local community with so many plant donations. We are so proud of this achievement and recognition of everyone’s hard work.”

White Lodge is set in 10 acres of countryside, with every room having a unique view and positioned at the end of a lane with a working farm as their neighbour.  

Residents can stroll or sit and watch the wildlife in one several outdoor seating areas.  At the start of this year at a residents' meeting, it was decided that this year the residents wanted to create a number of specific garden areas.

The team at White Lodge have worked closely with the residents to bring these plans to life.  The vision was cultivating the raised beds, planting fruit and ornamental trees along with creating a formal memorial rose garden.  

White Lodge has also taken part in Countryfile’s Plant Britain.  The residents were featured planting fruit trees on the 7 March edition of the popular BBC1 Sunday evening Show. 

As summer approached, residents planted seeds including sunflowers and tomatoes, which all thrived in the greenhouse. The team then focussed on the internal courtyard at White Lodge - a sun trap with white walls and ornamental trees. The residents decided to plant the raised beds.  

With so many borders to fill, Senior Activities Coordinator Tina put out an appeal on Facebook to the local community for plant donations. She was inundated with kind donations of all sorts of plants, and after several days of hard work by the team and residents there was an array of colour in the courtyard. 

The White Lodge team say the outdoors is as much a part of the home as the interior. In the past few weeks alone a therapy horse has visited in the grounds, there have been dancers and singers performing in the gardens, everyone enjoyed eating alfresco bringing the dining room outdoors and the chef produced a barbecue.  

The home, which provides nursing, residential and respite care, can be reached on 01666 860381.