Shirley Ballas said she has spent the past four years watching her mother Audrey live with chronic illness, and now she is using a public campaign at RHS Chelsea to push COPD into the open. Speaking on Monday 18 May from The Breathing Space garden, Ballas said she wanted to join Sanofi and the Breathe Equal campaign to get the word out about a disease she had never heard of until 2022.
“It’s really about just getting the word out,” she said, adding that her mother was diagnosed with COPD in 2022 and that it took her a year to learn how to say the full name, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “I’m watching her suffer. I’d never heard of the disease before 2022,” Ballas said.
The size of the problem is what gives her campaign its force. Ballas said she and her mother had easy access to treatment, but that there are “lots of places throughout the country that have no access at all to get any treatment,” making awareness as important as diagnosis. The Breathe Equal campaign, backed by Sanofi and Asthma + Lung UK, is meant to push that message beyond one family and into communities that may not know where to turn.
Her comments came as The Breathing Space garden, designed by previous gold medal winner Angus Thompson, was being presented as part of the Chelsea show. Thompson said he wanted the space to raise awareness of the invisible impact of breathlessness, which affects daily life long before it is visible to others. He also said one in five people in the UK will develop a lung condition in their lifetime.
The garden is built to make that idea physical. At its centre is a large multi-purpose platform for gentle activity and rest, surrounded by seated areas known as pause points. A lungs sculpture sits on a base made of coal, with the structure supported by recycled oxygen cylinders. Trees, flowers, plants and a water feature fill out the space, turning the garden into a place that is as much about reflection as it is about design.
Ballas said the details mattered to her. “We have to mention the lungs [sculpture] over there, and the base that it’s on is coal,” she said, noting that many lung diseases were linked to the mining industry years ago. She said she loved the trees, which reminded her of bonsai trees in Japan, and added: “And I love the waterfall because I think water represents peace,” before calling the whole space “remarkable.”
The garden’s message lands because it sits at the meeting point of personal experience and public health. Ballas and Audrey have been living together, and she has been open about her mother’s chronic illness for years. But Monday’s appearance gave that private reality a wider purpose: to make a condition that can be hidden, delayed or ignored easier to talk about before it becomes harder to treat. The question now is whether the campaign can reach the places Ballas says still have no access at all.
