National Garden Scheme Event raises £1,000 for charity!
Garden Team welcomes 140 visitors
Originally set up in 1927 to support district nurses, the National Garden Scheme now raises millions of pounds for nursing and health charities each year. On Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 April, our fabulous gardening team welcomed around 140 visitors as part of the scheme and raised £1,000.
Visitors were encouraged to walk around the gardens exploring areas such as the Woodland Walk, Fellows garden, Library Court, the cut flower bed, the Emma Darwin greenhouse and the Community Garden area - all looking fantastic with spring colour.
The garden team were available to show visitors around and talk about the work that they do, including the ever-popular wellbeing activities with the students. The Community Garden volunteers also came along for the event and talked about the delicious range of vegetables and herbs that they grow for the students and staff of the college.
The weather was sunny and warm, perfect for visitors to walk around and see the beautiful planted containers, naturalistic planting, trees full of blossoms and late spring plants beginning to flower. They were also able to visit and walk into the original Emma Darwin greenhouse which the gardeners still use to overwinter tender plants and pelargoniums. This wonderful greenhouse is a rare pleasure to see in a quiet corner of the garden.
More adventurous visitors were able to walk around the edge of the college boundary where there are fragments of old woodland which are rich with wildlife. They could also see the areas where the gardeners compost and chip waste and create ‘dead hedges’ which are great for wildlife and biodiversity.
The selection of plants for visitors to purchase for the charity were lovingly grown by the garden team and proved very popular - on offer were sweet peas, gaura, nicotiana, grasses, pelargoniums and herbs.
Sculptures belonging to the women’s art collection of the college are also there to see among the planting and trees in the gardens, providing an extra treat for visitors, and the Art Cafe was open as usual for refreshments.
The garden team are looking forward to next year when they can do it all over again!