A garden designer who mentored for ACE Monmouth’s garden mentoring initiative last year, is running a Wilder Garden Workshop this month. Cheryl Cummings, whose re-wilded garden was featured in this year’s Open Garden Scheme, hopes to encourage other green-fingered enthusiasts about creating and nurturing gardens specifically for nature.
“It’s all about helping garden owners towards creating gardens for health and well being in a sustainable wildlife focussed way,” she explained. “I met the garden owner I had volunteered to help, Julia Garnet, in Osbaston in January this year shortly after her garden had been hard landscaped and borders marked out and prepared for planting. Julia had asked to be part of the scheme for help in choosing plants to fill the spaces she had, to be as wildlife friendly as possible, particularly good for pollinating insects, lift the spirits, be perceived to be beautiful and useful too.
Julia is a keen and knowledgeable gardener, who despite some physical restrictions has made the most of her abilities and those of willing friends to make a huge difference to the garden. In just six months it has changed from being an almost blank canvas of stone paving, rendered walls and a lawn, to a colourful pollinator haven for her and the local wildlife to use and enjoy. Her garden lies in full sun and well drained soil, perfect for the needs of wildlife and pollinators, her packed herb bed is full of flowers which are a magnet for bees and other insects. The borders have been planted not just with Julia’s favourites but with a range of permanent plants flowering over a long season for nectar and pollen availability and with flowers of different shapes and sizes to suit a wide range of pollinators’ feeding strategies.
Cheryl added: “I was really pleased to find that the landscapers had made a pond, although small, it has now been planted with species to oxygenate the water, shade it from the sun and with marginals to take out nutrients and for damsel and dragonfly nymphs to climb out onto. Like all fresh water it will be an invaluable asset to the garden.”
Now that the rear garden is making such brilliant progress, Julia has turned her attention to the front. It’s a small space but if the next six months are anything like the last, look out for the most wildlife friendly, sustainable and beautiful front garden in Osbaston! Cheryl explained that Britain’s private gardens cover 1,801,151 acres and “if they all made space for nature within them what a difference that would make. If anyone would like to learn more about creating and nurturing gardens specifically for nature, she will be running her Wilder Garden Workshop on the 27th of September. Please email [email protected] for details.