Kate hears moving stories from people in addiction recovery during garden visit

The Princess of Wales heard moving stories from people recovering from addiction and showed her green-fingered side as she visited a garden where people in recovery can embrace the outdoors.Kate visited Garon Park in Southend, Essex, where charity the Forward Trust hosts weekly gardening sessions for recovering addicts it supports.The princess was shown around the cricket ground, which has a wellbeing walk and gardening area where people on the Forward Trust’s Southend Treatment and Recovery Service (Stars) can go to walk and talk, or try their hand at gardening.Kate is patron of the Forward Trust and launched its annual Addiction Awareness Week in 2021 (Chris Jackson/PA)PA WireKate met service users including recovering alcoholic Steph Sampson, who told the princess how in the depths of her addiction she lied to her children about her alcohol consumption.“I found out that there was a trauma that I buried so deep that I didn’t think was a problem, but actually it really was,” she told the princess on Thursday.“I had counselling for that, which was a massive sigh of relief.”Ms Sampson, 45, of Leigh-on-Sea, told Kate of a moving letter her daughter Mia, 21, wrote to her begging her to give up alcohol which was a turning point, and she has now been sober for more than six months with the help of the Forward Trust.Kate was shown round the community initiative in Southend-on-Sea (Chris Jackson/PA)PA WireKate congratulated Ms Sampson for her hard work and said “I bet”, when Ms Sampson said her children are “so proud” of her.Ms Sampson, who is now a peer mentor at Stars, told reporters Kate was “very touched” by her story.“You could tell she (the Princess of Wales) was genuinely pleased for me, and (she) could tell that I had come a long way,” she said.Kate lauded the greenspace as a “fantastic environment” and told Liam King, who leads conservation at Garon Park: “Spaces like this are so vital for lots of different organisations to be able to come together and use.“Often people don’t know where to go.”The Princess of Wales met Steph Sampson, left, and other service users during her visit (Chris Jackson/PA)PA WireThe Princess of Wales, who is patron of the Forward Trust and made her visit to mark Addiction Awareness Week, said the outdoors is “so vital for healing”.“I should have my husband here, he knows a lot (about gardening), he’s really passionate,” she told Mr King, before joking about a beehive experience for children being “right up my street”.Read MoreShe met people who are on the Forward Trust’s treatment and recovery service who were planting seedlings as part of the weekly gardening sessions.Asked by Mr King if she does any gardening, Kate said: “A little bit.”The princess spoke to people about the importance of “understanding the root causes” of addiction and “starting the conversation”.Kate launched the first Addiction Awareness Week in 2021 on behalf of the trust.For this year’s campaign week, which began on Saturday and runs until Friday, the Forward Trust is aiming to start 17,000 conversations about addiction, to mark the number of lives lost to drug or alcohol- related causes in the UK each year.