Prototype costings

• Design £5,000
• Paths £3,000
• Fencing £1,500
• Structures £1,000
• Assembly tent £2,500
• Benches x16 @£125 = £2,000
• Plants £2,000
• Soft landscaping £3,000

Total: £20,000

Ideas for covering

• Canvas, telegraph poles, chestnut posts
• Cheap, movable, replicable. Prob £600 all in.

CAD plan sketch of layout for assembly area

Ideas for Assemblies

• peat free compost
• native plants
• rewilding
• local materials
• rising temperatures & ecology
• climate justice & horticulture

RHS Hampton Court deadlines

• Wave 1 deadline mid-September 2024
• Wave 2 deadline late-November 2024
• Lead time to organise assemblies November 2024 to July 2025, ie 8 months

Trust the People info

• Community Assembly manual
• Community At Work organisation, authors of Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-making
• Slide deck for workshop

Yr Ardd visit

• Visited Andrea at Yr Ardd, as possible garden
• Liz from Yr Ardd (administrator) was there, plus Martin(?) from Tir Coed and Malcolm Berry, The Dreaded Gardener
• Possibly interested in amphitheatre area, then plants dispersed
• Also, backup plans for different stages?
• Noticeboard blackboard, what’s happening, plus feedback board, have your say until the words fill up

Footpath widths

• 0.6m — 1 adult only
• 0.9m — 2 adults just
• 0.8m — 1 pram/wheelchair only
• 1.15m — pram/wheelchair + child
• 1.2m — 2 adults comfortably
• 1.7m — 2 prams/wheelchairs comfortably

Big fat dandelion

• Plant a big fat Dandelion front and centre. Edible, native wild flower, great for pollinators.
• Bugle, Yarrow, Meadowsweet. I will start adding these to spreadsheet
• Cheap, repurposed agricultural water trough as central water feature? Idea is to open source plans and costings, and make garden affordable for other community projects.

Benjamin Vogt quote

“Can gardens literally save the world? No…
Gardens can save the world by saving us. They can bring us back into contact with diversity…
Gardens as activism as surely as any art form…
Gardens that stir our senses and give us actionable faith and hope.”

~ Benjamin Vogt, A New Garden Ethic pp158

Mailing list

Mailing list alternatives to Substack (Nazi) and MailChimp (Nasty):

• listmonk, free, self-hosted
  • PikaPods hosting $2 per month
  • Railway hosting $5 per month
• Buttondown 1,000+@$9pcm, 5,000+@$29pcm, 10,000+@$79pcm
• Beehiiv 2,500+@$42pcm, 10,000+@$84pcm

Flowers for gardener

• Flowers for Denise XR Gardener
  • Ramsons
  • Rough Hawkbit
  • Maiden Pink
  • Welsh Poppy
  • Foxglove
  • Red Valerian
• Welsh names for plants
  • Botanic Garden Wales list
  • Wicipedia Cymraeg
  • Y Bywiadur
  • Plant-Lore, Welsh plant names
  • Welsh Academy Dictionary
• Trust The People’s Community Assembly Manual
• Hinge brackets to lock benches to ground level brackets. Pics to follow.
• Woodland path, green wall. Ivy wall, grown on relatively lightweight wire, portable. Ferns? For the shady back.
• Imperfection at the centre, like a Persian rug
• Promote diversity of species, cultures & languages
• More plant ideas
  • Honeysuckle (flowers July)
  • Hawthorn
  • Hazel (cultivar? nuts forming in July)
  • Holly (pruned?)
  • Valerian
  • Pennywort

“A designed space to foster equal communication”

Gravel patterns

Had a good talk with Gary, with whom I’m creating the primary school garden. He suggested a technique for creating a shape in self-binding gravel. Bury rigid yet flexible drainage pipe into the gravel, tamp it down, then lift out the pipe and replace with appropriate aggregate. In the case of the school garden, this is a labyrinth. For the Hope Garden, this could be markers for the moving benches.