Hertfordshire Gardens Trust | Helping Schools To Garden

Helping Schools To Garden

Our work with schools focuses on the use of horticulture in the curriculum and in extra curricular activities and involves the whole school community.

Every project we support must have the active involvement of pupils right through from early ideas to how best to maintain the garden. Headteachers tell us this has helped bring about a school ethos of care, ownership and responsibility.

We offer information packages, site visits, talks and a small grant scheme, all operated through a group of dedicated volunteers, hand-picked for their expertise and experience in landscape, garden design, teaching and school governorship.

This programme has come about as a result of a recent survey we conducted through some seventy schools who had all been involved with the Trust over the past seven years and who had either attended our In-Service Training days for teachers and governors with our tutor Dr. Sue Johnson, the RHS's Education Consultant or who had taken part in our school grounds competitions.

Our Garden Information Sheets are full of practical advice on anything from planting and aftercare to tools, hedging and screening, poisonous plants, gravel gardening, compost making, paths and paving, saving seeds, plants for a sunny site to plants for shade, vegetables, polytunnels and cold frames, herbs, heritage running a school gardening club and many more. They are all free.

Also free are our site visits for those schools who have particular problems in either setting up, design, planting plans or maintenance. Our new Wheelbarrow Workshops for primary schools focus on growing vegetables and we come armed with props in season such as blue pumpkins, misshapen vegetables and all kinds of seeds.

If you are a school and interested in receiving our Garden Information Sheets, would like a school visit or a talk then please get in touch with:-