The bones of the Hope Garden

Paths are the bones of the garden. They define the space, open it up to exploration, enable access for the care required to tend the plants.

Where does the water go?

The site of the Hope Garden is at the lower end of a clay rhos pasture field in West Wales. As you can imagine, there is a lot of water, and it all flows through the garden!

Species on my mind

Yusef from West Wales Biodiversity Information Centre ran an ecology survey at the site of the Hope Garden. As part of the report, he detailed the species within a 1km radius of the garden using the Aderyn online database.

Ideas for covering

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

CAD plan sketch of layout for assembly area

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.

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.

Starting out

Denise chat

• Possible Senedd backing? Contact Jane Davidson
• Constraint on space 10m x 15m
• Space for furnishings to move around, to accommodate diverse needs (Radical Inclusion pillar)
• Lightweight robust movable seating. Can have it as amphitheatre, then move them to individual breakout groups:
  
• Move according to the needs of everyone being able to have clear lines of vision and hearing
• 3 phases of the assembly
  1. Intro,
  2. Breakout discussions / decision prioritisation
  3. Plenary - gather ideas & suggestions, then prioritise for sharing
• Outputs could be quantifiable outputs, measured on graph (eg Climate Anxiety Scale)
• Outputs if they are decisions and recommendations are then shared at or after the process.
• Trust The People running free online Community Assembly course in September
• XR Choosing Our Future With Community Assemblies
• Infrastructure
  • John Little approach of varied growing medium, build in complexity of habitat.
  • Infrastructure needs consideration of assembly and dis-assembly and moving to another location after RHS.
• Liaising with speakers eg
  • Dave Goulson - Bumble Bee Conservation Trust
  • Cleeve West – homeless garden creator
• Need support with facilitators and to promote training to get practice in regularly in advance
• The XR Gardeners will be pulling together a list of experts for local groups to draw on

Jake input

• Wildlife and forest garden
  • Creating habitat for wildlife, by building in structural complexity (ie nooks and crannies!) into the garden infrastructure (paths, hedging, growing material, seating, pillars etc). #
  • Diversity of native plants and wild flowers, to support larval stages of inverterbrates, as insects are the backbone of the ecosystem.
  • Growing perennial edible crops that are resilient to climate changes, which also highlights the need for agriculture to change (ie toward agroforestry, away from energy intensive farming)
• Possible topics: gardening in a climate crisis, industrialised horticulture, peat compost, native plants, perennial crops, community gardens, mass extinctions, resilient gardens, community gardens…

Hope as a working name

Had a chat with Beth, I think Hope is a better working name than Crisis.