“Have you seen Stan today?”
“No, I’ll check the watering can……yes, he is here, and he has a friend!”
Stan is not one of our Friday Friends, although you would be forgiven for thinking that. Stan is in fact our pet snail – well, more accurately, our adopted pet snail. He lives in the courtyard garden at Longridge Community Hospital, and we are quite attached to the little fella.
Given that we at Rosemary and Time are famous for our singing, drumming and dare I say, outrageous bingo sessions, I sometimes forget that my background is in gardening. I am indeed a qualified and experienced Social and Therapeutic Horticulture Practitioner – just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?
That is why I was so excited when a routine trip to our family GP led to a wonderful opportunity to return to my roots……don’t worry, there will be no more puns, I promise. Our GP had been chatting with the Ward Manager at our local community hospital about the state of their courtyard garden. Long story short, would we like to take on the job of sprucing it up? Yes please!
Those of you that enjoy your own gardens will know just how beneficial they can be for your health, both physical and emotional. Yes, we all complain that the grass needs cutting again, the weeds are relentless and ‘someone’ wants another trip to the garden centre – how many more plants could we possibly need? But be honest, how chuffed do you feel when you sit down in the evening, a little glass of something in your hand, looking out on your beautiful lawn, tidy borders and yes, another variety of geranium!
Being connected to nature is in our DNA. When you are in hospital and have such limited access to the outside world it can make all the difference to be able to go and sit in a peaceful, colourful space, taking in all the sensory elements of your surroundings and escaping for a short time. Even just being able to look out of the window onto a bright, cheerful space can make all the difference.
As a social enterprise, Rosemary and Time tries very hard to earn as much of our income as we possibly can. We are extremely grateful for the grants that we successfully apply for, but it is not financially healthy to rely on those. So, opportunities like this project enable us to use our skills for the good of those using the garden and earn money to keep our own sessions going throughout the community. That is social enterprise.
It was such an honour to be trusted with the rejuvenation of this garden. Alison and I, along with our willing husbands, (we say willing…..they may say otherwise ) set about jet washing the patio and replacing the old broken furniture with bright chairs and benches, all made of recycled plastic bottles.
We tidied up the few remaining shrubs, filling the borders with fresh plants that would flower at all times of the year, lots of spring flowering bulbs and then covering the soil with a bark mulch that would reduce the amount of weeding that needed doing. We reused some abandoned pots, added a few more and even planted up hanging baskets for all the empty hooks on the wall. All of our plants came from local nurseries, and some we had even grown ourselves. The environmental impact of our work in this garden was important to us.
All of this activity was overlooked by our team mascot (he might say ‘manager’) – Stan, the snail. Every time we go into the garden to water or weed the plot, we look for him. We are delighted to see he now has a friend and are really trying hard to contain our anticipation that we may become grandmas to a few snail babies.
As the weather warms up, we really hope that the staff, patients, and visiting families enjoy the garden as a place to escape to, enjoy some much needed sunshine and maybe a quick chat with Stan. He would love the company.
Comments