The climate resilient garden is taking shape…
18th September 2023
We’ve been so busy in the garden since Spring that there’s been little time to keep this blog up to date.
By the end of February 2023, we had cleared the two large areas for the climate resilient project and prepared them for planting. Previous blogs have explained the thinking and planning for the project (see news items from September and November 2022 and February 2023) and there is now an explanatory notice in the garden.
Volunteers currently gather to garden on Tuesday mornings and planning takes place during the mid-morning coffee break.
The Garden Group plan their next moves over a cup of coffee
The beds were marked out with stakes, flower pots (and other items lying around) following the design which had inspired us (November 2022 blog).
A huge list of suitable plants was compiled for volunteers to either propagate or buy items from it. We rely on plant sales to fund our work and are grateful to have regular customers who make this possible.
Planting started gradually as we began to get the chosen plants. We are labelling them carefully as we plant them so that visitors can easily find similar for their own gardens. We have just started propagating some for sale but it will be a while before we have them on our sales table.
Important and exciting moments were when the dry river bed was put in place, the Olive tree was planted in the hot-colour bed, and later the trio of Cypress trees in the cool-colour bed. One visitor liked the dry river bed so much that he photographed it and created one in his own garden! As our project develops we hope our visitors will copy other features.
The herbaceous plants are now coming into flower, giving a vibrancy of colour and insect activity. The ‘hot’ bed has predominant reds, oranges and yellows contrasting with the blues, purples and whites of the ‘cool bed on the other side of the main path. The pictures below show the two beds in August 2023.
