News
Going back to school
TV gardener and designer Chris Beardshaw is going back to school at this year's show with a garden designed to enrich learning experiences for children of all ages.
RHS Gold Medal-winner Chris is hoping for a gold star and to go one better than his RHS Silver-Gilt winning garden at the Hampton Court show in 2004. This year’s The Growing Schools Garden - learning outside the classroom, designed for Learning Through Landscapes and sponsored by the DfES, represents a stylised modern school environment for children and young people of mixed abilities. It demonstrates a range of opportunities such as fostering creativity, learning about growing food, improving health and well-being outdoors, enhancing play and social development and creating a sense of culture, heritage and belonging through choice of plants and features.
A number of local schools have been commissioned to create some of the artworks and features for Chris’s show garden. A proportion of the plant material, including a mix of native and exotic annuals and biennials, trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants are also being grown by the participating schools. The planting reflects the variety of uses in the botanical world, including culinary plants, medicinal plants and plants used in manufacture and industry, alongside plants to encourage wildlife, sensory plants and plants to reflect personal, local and international heritage.
Elsewhere in the show, two local schools, Alton Infant School and Sheddington Primary School, are creating small gardens. Alton pupils have designed Learning to look after our world, a microcosm of their own school grounds which demonstrates conservation, recycling, organic gardening and wildlife habitats. The Willow Pattern Plot, by pupils at Sheddington Primary School, celebrates the school’s twentieth ‘China’ anniversary using the Chinese love story Willow Pattern as the inspiration point.
RHS Learning
RHS Learning supports a host of innovative opportunities for people of all ages to experience the social and health benefits of gardening. As the UK’s leading gardening charity the RHS has an active schools programme that currently helps more than 5,000 schools (more than 400,000 children). The RHS launched the Campaign for School Gardening in February to help every school in the UK to get gardening. This started with a survey and competition to find out how schools across the country are using growing and the barriers to gardening in school. Complete the survey and enter the competition at www.rhs.org.uk/schoolgarden. The RHS campaign and competition is backed by Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins who will visit one of the winning schools.