Balfour Hospital

I was approached in summer, 2017, by the construction company to undertake the soft landscaping at the new Balfour hospital. I knew that the opportunity of a project of this scale in Orkney would never arise again. The preparation work for this project was very labour intensive, and from the drawings I worked out how many plants were required, how they were to be positioned, I sourced all the plants and other materials. The work took eight men three months to complete. There are some 10,800 shrubs, 460 trees, 974 bags of bark and 500kg of grass seed.

The interior courtyard garden is the piece we as a company are most proud of, which came with its own challenges. All the plants and bark had to be wheelbarrowed in through the building, while the turf and some 88 tonnes of soil had to be craned in over the top of the building, one tonne at a time.