Garden of Resilience

Posted at 11:05 am on 7th September, 2022

Wellacre Joins RHS Flower Show

In July, Wellacre was delighted to exhibit at The RHS Flower Show, at Tatton Park, yet again! Staff and students jumped at the opportunity to create an allotment with the theme 'Garden of Resilience.'

Schools in the North were invited to design and build an allotment garden as part of an exhibition area for Flower Show visitors.  Students attended an online workshop with a RHS Flower Show Coordinator to run through the brief and theme, and tips on plant health. 

The project was Introduced as part of Wellacre’s P6 Co-Curricular programme based in the Eco Centre.  Since January 2022, more than 60 students, including Wellacre’s Science Ambassadors, have taken part to interpret this year’s theme.

    

This year’s school garden theme was resilience. Wellacre’s students chose to interpret this as the resilience of nature after watching David Attenborough’s BBC TV series “Green Planet”. In one of the episodes , ‘Human Worlds’, it shows how nature takes back land and buildings, which humans have left derelict. 

Wellacre’s students wanted to design, build and grow a garden showing how nature might take back a derelict classroom.  All of the props used were recycled and well over 80% of the plants were grown from seed, bulbs or plugs by our students.

  

The project also focused on food crops and plants for pollinators.  As part of the garden, numerous plants were included, which are loved by pollinators such as Lobelia, Buddleia, Lupin, Salvia, Verbenia, Scabiosa and Lavendula.  In addition, a number of food plants were grown including tomatoes, cucumber, hazel (hazelnut), thyme, pepper, chilli and blackthorn (sloe).

Thanks to the students who helped pull the whole design together at the RHS Flower Show - Anthony, Amir, Callum, and Nicky (Yr 11), Jack and Tom (Yr 10) and Miles and Josh (Yr 9).

Wellacre’s garden gained lots of positive comments and attention from visitors and the media; students’ hard work featured on Gardener’s World, The One Show and the local news. 

Mr Toogood, Leader of Science, said:

“The feedback for our garden was phenomenal. All the visitors we had complimented the garden, the school and our students who had designed, grown and built it, and said it was the best they had seen!  

“Staff really enjoyed chatting to visitors all week - we even had two guests who came to see our stand and said they had only bought tickets to the Flower Show after seeing Wellacre’s garden on the TV!”

 

Thanks to the fantastic work of the Wellacre team, the whole garden has now been relocated to Wellacre’s Eco Centre to be enjoyed by all staff and students.