Dame Laura Lee

The Garden Design Confessional

The episode concludes a series exploring Maggie's cancer support centres by interviewing co-founders Dame Laura Lee and Marcia Blakenham about their 26-year journey commissioning

Key takeaways

• Dame Laura Lee and Marcia Blakenham founded Maggie's after their close friend Maggie was diagnosed with cancer, aiming to fill psychological support gaps left by the NHS.
• The charity initially treated gardens as an afterthought but shifted to integrating landscape architects early in the design process starting with the Charing Cross centre.

Main topics

• Maggie's cancer charity
• landscape architecture integration

Notable quotes

you should leave the hospital feeling better than when you arrived.

Conclusion

The episode underscores how intentional landscape architecture transfor

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Welcome to the Garden Design Confessional. I'm Darren Hawkes. I'm a landscape designer and I've been creating gardens for over 25 years. In this podcast, I'll be unlocking the imagination of other garden designers, unravelling the complexities of their process and discovering how the spaces they create change the lives of those who use them. In this series, all my guests have one thing in common. They've all designed gardens for the cancer-caring charity, Maggie's, who offer practical and psychological support to people with cancer. Famous for its architect designed buildings, I thought it was time we took a closer look at the landscapes that surround them. In this episode, I speak with Dame Laura Lee and Marsha Blakenham. Laura has been at the helm of MAGIS since its inception, having been MAGIS' oncology nurse. Marcia, as well as being a close friend of MAGIS, has also been instrumental in commissioning each of the centres, both in terms of landscape and architecture. It's often been said there is no other client that has worked with so many superstar architects and I think the same could be said about their appointment of garden designers. So I thought it would be interesting to get their take on the whole design process. We met at their West London offices and talked about the successes as well as some of the mishaps. I was really touched by their support for each other and felt rewarded to hear how the value of creating gardens have become even more evident with each project they've completed. Our conversation was a brilliant conclusion to this first series and really helped shine a light on the client's role within the whole design process. Speaker 1 (1:45) Dame Laura Lee, Marsha Blakenham, welcome to the Garden Design Confessional and thank you for having me here today at the offices here in Hammersmith. I've been touring the country for the last three months having conversations with a number of the garden designers who've worked on Maggie's centres over the last 26 years and we've kind of come to the end of those conversations now but I thought it would be really illuminating for our listeners to go back to the beginning and to hear both of your stories about the development of the charity, the development of these wonderful centres with beautiful landscapes around them and how all of this started. Maybe Marsha, if I can start with you, if you can just explain to the listeners who you are and how you're involved with Maggie's. I Speaker 3 (2:38) loved Maggie. She was an incredibly close friend. and I did a lot of going through many of her dreadful procedures with her when she was going through this terrible chemotherapy which made her mucosal penic and then anyway but I just sat there and she just lay there and it was torture actually but so before Maggie's was obviously something we were going to do I did lots of different things but Maggie's it was doing Maggie's which what gave me a real purpose. And Speaker 1 (3:15) so life before, when Maggie was well, had you been friends for many years? Yes, Speaker 3 (3:20) yes, for a long, long time, yes. She was a fantastically good writer and a very good lecturer, but she too actually hadn't quite decided, I think until she died actually, what her purpose really was. Speaker 1 (3:33) And Speaker 3 (3:34) of course it wasn't her purpose to actually found this incredible charity. I mean, she... her idea was just this single little centre which she, was her way of actually I think making her own very difficult situation better. That at least she thought that she could get going, something that would make things better for other people in the same situation as herself. Laura was Maggie's oncology nurse and described herself Speaker 3 (4:07) completely ridiculously as her wee oncology nurse at the Speaker 1 (4:12) time. Speaker 3 (4:12) Laura was never a wee oncology nurse, even if she was very young. Speaker 1 (4:17) Laura, do you want to tell us, do you remember meeting Maggie for the first time? Speaker 2 (4:21) I do. I remember Maggie coming to the clinic. She was a beautiful, elegant woman who had a dancer's walk, didn't she, Marcia? and so her presence was immediately felt in the clinic. You're going back 30 plus years, so this is pre the internet, but this was someone who came who wanted to understand about her treatment, what her choices were, what she could do to help herself. So this was quite a sort of radical experience for the consultant who was looking after her and myself as his clinical nurse specialist about how to respond to this. proactive patient who wanted to be involved in the decision-making and the treatment. So it was a very illuminating experience if you like of which today we would regard as normal. Speaker 1 (5:14) And how in those early weeks and months of your first meeting, how did that personal relationship affect you because had this person not come into your life you're... Your life would be completely different. Is Speaker 3 (5:28) she Speaker 2 (5:28) the health and national health service now? I don't think so. But I feel so lucky to have met Maggie. And we'll come on to how I met Marcia in a minute. But actually hugely lucky to then, through Maggie, to find myself to meet with Marcia and to then have had a life of working with Marcia. But I think what Maggie taught me as a cancer nurse was really the lens of... what the NHS wasn't able to do and what was missing. And I know you've touched on the kind of view from the front line, but what she talked about was you should leave the hospital feeling better than when you arrived. And we all know that with the strip lights, the lack of windows, the no views out to nature, was something I'd never considered as a cancer nurse. And there was Maggie talking about, I should be leaving here feeling better, but I don't, I feel worse. And that conversation of then leading from what you could do from our own experience to help others was my learning about what the NHS did do really well. but the bits that were missing, and that led to the formation of the first centre in Edinburgh, which, as you said, Marcia, was seen as a pilot project. We never really thought it would be anything more than just one centre. But you speak Speaker 1 (6:50) about that like it was inevitable, but you must have been going home from shifts thinking, is my life about... I'm being taken into a different direction or my eyes are being opened to a different way of caring or... I Speaker 2 (7:05) think I was curious, interested in learning from one's patients and their families, wanting to respond to how you could meet their needs. But there was no question that Maggie then took you on a journey with that. So as she went through her treatment and went into remission, she travelled to the United States, saw what they were doing to provide support for people with cancer and families, came back from that saying, Laura, we're going to have to do something here. And all this time, Maggie was having this separate conversation with Marcia because myself and Marcia had never met. And then she asked if I would come out to the States with her to have a look at some of these centres and places that she'd seen. We looked for someone else to run the first centre, we didn't make an appointment and I sort of accidentally fell into being the first employee. And of course the worst bit of it all was that Maggie had died before the first centre opened so she never got to realise and see first hand the difference that that centre was Speaker 3 (8:08) able to provide. But before she died, She had persuaded you that you would be the first non-existent place at that Speaker 2 (8:14) stage. Yeah, and I had no idea why I was making that decision. She was very persuasive and Speaker 3 (8:19) very passionate. Speaker 2 (8:19) I just felt it was the right thing to do and I didn't know any better. Aren't we Speaker 1 (8:24) lucky that you didn't. That trip out to the States, and Maggie was in remission at that stage, wasn't she? She was, Speaker 2 (8:32) yes. Speaker 1 (8:32) What did you see and what was it that was so... Speaker 2 (8:36) Well we saw a number of different places and a couple of centres that we visited did have therapeutic gardens as they were called in the US. Some of them were very urban support centres right in the heart of the hospital and in a way what the Edinburgh Centre was was a sort of merge of that, its own building, its own front door with its own garden and that kind of came out of the experience of looking at different types of facilities. Speaker 1 (9:07) And at the time, was there anything like that in the UK? Speaker 2 (9:11) Nothing really, no. Information was starting to be produced for people with cancer to be able to access. There was a start of a telephone helpline, but there was no places that people could come to. Speaker 1 (9:24) And you've mentioned it now, and I've spoken about this in most of the conversations we've had, the writings that as a designer for Maggie's we receive, which is the architect's brief, which there's a whole section on landscape about it, and this wonderful pamphlet, which is really a sort of manifesto for change called A View from the Front Line. And Marsha, you write really eloquently in the introduction and the sort of summary of that. Both there's a lovely sentence you used to describe Maggie. which says she was very fleet of foot, Speaker 3 (9:59) paints Speaker 1 (10:00) this picture of somebody who was a dynamo. She Speaker 3 (10:03) was, yes. That essay, which she was asked to write by her surgeon for an obviously extremely readable magazine called The Breast. Big Speaker 1 (10:17) fellowship. Speaker 3 (10:18) Exactly. He asked her to write about what it was like to be a patient. and that's what she wrote. But it's turned out to be the sort of manifesto for Maggie's. That was not what it intended to be. And I think, I can't remember, I think pretty early on we decided we would publish it because we thought it was a very, very powerful bit of writing and explained the situation. I Speaker 1 (10:46) was really Speaker 3 (10:46) moved Speaker 1 (10:47) by it and having kind of been involved on the periphery of the charity for a number of years. Whenever I sort of lose direction or sort of think, what are we doing here? I go back and read it again. And although it's brief and economic, there are the sort of sentence of being able to look out to a tree moving or a sky and to hear the wind passing out. They really capture the essence of what we're trying to do, which is to kind