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Hope Garden Newsletter — Tue 20th Feb 🌧️

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Newsletter
by Jake Rayson/ on 20 Feb 2024

Hope Garden Newsletter — Tue 20th Feb 🌧️

A Community Assembly at the heart of a wildlife forest garden 💚

  1. News
  2. Links
  3. Photos
  4. Hope

Welcome to the third issue of the weekly Hope Garden newsletter. It’s raining in West Wales, again. But this has not dampened our spirits, as we look forward to submitting our grant application in the next couple of weeks.

Any suggestions, comments, ideas, please feel free to email me on hello@hopegarden.uk

Jake Rayson

1. News

Grant application budget

We’ve reached the budget part of the grant application, and this is where things get nitty and gritty. It’s appropriate, nay, necessary that the design and creation of the prototype Hope Garden follows the processes of Community Assemblies. This means that (grant willing) the garden will be co-designed and co-created by the people who will be using the space.

So, last issues workshops, workshops, workshops mantra is making it into the budget, and there will be budgets for a slew of Community Assembly run workshops, including but not limited to:

  1. Ecological survey — the base survey, before any work commences, and then instructions for subsequent surveys, to measure wildlife impacts
  2. Co-design — possibly 3 workshops, with special guests providing inputs, from a wildlife perspective, a practical community perspective, and an outdoor well-being workshop perspective
  3. Landscaping — hard landscaping, how the structure of the garden is created; planting & pruning for the long term; making wooden benches

The other task is to reach out to more local charities and organisations to sound out their interest, and a jolly testimonial would be nice as well.

Jake Rayson

Ffynnone Resilience

I have written a blog post for Ffynnone Resilience about the Hope Garden and Community Assemblies, which should be appearing on their news page any day soon.

Jake Rayson

Hope Garden definitions

It’s always handy to know what you’re talking about, so I‘ve made a definitions page for the Hope Garden. The idea is to have an “elevator pitch” of one sentence, and then a bit more detail.

  1. Community Assembly — A Community Assembly is an effective and empowering way to build real participatory democracy into local decision making through a structured process, bringing communities of interest together in inclusive decision making.
  2. Forest garden — A forest garden works with nature to grow edible crops. It is sustainable, low maintenance and wildlife friendly and emulates the woodland edge using edible perennial and ground cover plants. Essentially, it is an edible ecosystem.
  3. Wildlife garden — Every garden has the potential to be a wildlife garden by ensuring the presence of the two key elements, habitat and food.

This is, and probably shall remain, a work in progress, ever-evolving.

Jake Rayson

3. Photos

Photo of garden sign on old garden gate

Gellon Trujillo Urban Garden in Ponce, Puerto Rico. We met up on social media!

For more information, read the blog post.

Green bush with berries

The amazing wildlife friendly native Alder Buckthorn

Great post on Facebook by Celtic Wild Flowers about an amazing wildlife plant. I use it prodigiously in mixed native windbreak hedges.

4. Hope

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.

~ Allan Ginsberg

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