Planting workshop

The Hope Garden landscaping isn’t quite finished, so we‘re unable to plant it up yet. Luckily, Pen Y Foidr allotments let us plant their Welsh varieties of apple, plum, damson and pear, along the northern hedge just to the rear of the Hope Garden.

A Local Place for Nature

As it says in the footer on the website, the Hope Garden is “Funded by Local Places for Nature, delivered by National Lottery Heritage Fund in partnership with the Welsh Government“

Three Things

These are the three principles I like to apply when thinking about wildlife forest garden design and ecology.

Plant Library

As the Hope Garden develops, so do the aims and objectives. The overaching aim is a “community space at the heart of a wildlife forest garden“. What this means on the ground so far is three key outcomes:

The Hope Garden Is Go

Maybe because of the relatively low number of guests, the workshop at Cilgerran Village Hall felt really productive and engaged, and covered a lot of ground, explaining the ideas behind the community space in a wildlife forest garden that is the Hope Garden.

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.