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Gardening
The Contented Gardener
Gardening
Nursery Children and Parents Take up their Spades as Budding Young Volunteers look for Local Gardens to Tend.
Parents of children at Hungerford Nursery School are working with nursery staff to identify local residents in need of help in their gardens and allotments.
The aim of the nursery’s gardening project is to identify people within the local Hungerford community, who may require assistance in their gardens and match them to teams of parents and children who will happily work in their garden on a voluntary basis.
It is hoped that a number of gardens will be found so that the nursery children can learn more about gardening and growing different types of fruit, vegetables and flowers throughout the year.
Staff at the nursery believe this project will be a very rich and valuable learning experience, but it would also teach the children the importance and value of getting involved in the local community.
The gardening project is only one of several other projects which have been funded by the local council to improve educational performance through parental involvement.
If your vegetable patch is in need of some TLC or you would like to revive a flagging flowerbed, please contact Harriet Coles, a parent involved in the Parent Partnership Project on 01488 683 506 to find out more.
I recently received the latest copy of the Beth Chatto Gardens Mail order catalogue which is always to delight to read. So often in plant catalogues you find the same plants over and over again. How refreshing to open it and find over 30 Daylilies in a variety of shades and colours, Hostas with names such as “Tallboy” and “Thumb Nail” and architectural Alliums to die for.
Mrs Chatto’s foreword to the catalogue is beautifully written and sums up perfectly my own feelings about gardens and gardening. She talks about gardens which feed “both the body and the soul. Banks cannot do that… We go into the garden however small to be refreshed, strengthened in body and mind by our bonds of nature, enabled to face what each day may bring.”
I have long been an admirer of Beth Chatto, her down to earth approach to gardening and her naturalistic style. Indeed I was a follower of her before I even knew it, such has been her influence on gardening and garden design for the last 30 years or more that her design style and use of plants has been much emulated.
Her books “The Dry Garden” and “The Damp Garden” pass on knowledge gained from her own experiences in her 5 acre garden in Essex. However “Dear Friend and Gardener”, an exchange of letters between her and Christopher Lloyd demonstrate the bonds of friendship gardening brings, a bond not only with Mr Lloyd but also with the reader.
Stacy Tuttle