The garden represents Loudoun Castle, which is an ancient castle right next to our school. The castle was constructed in 1804 and has a long history including a brief spell as a theme park in the 90s. Now the Castle is derelict, and nature has started to take over.

We have planted lots of flowering plants to make the garden wildlife friendly. We have planted peas, onions, potatoes and beetroot in the raised bed at the front of our garden which represents a walled garden, common in 19^th Century castles.

We are upcycling old toys to represent the theme park at Loudoun Castle. We reused cardboard to make our castle and plan to compost the whole castle once it has gone all soggy, as we expect it to do once nature takes over!

We have felt motivated by our design being chosen in the competition. Our garden space has been subjected to quite a lot of vandalism but being chosen gave us motivation to get out and keep working despite the challenges we have had.

Another challenge we faced was that our pea plants died, as we planted some out a bit too early and didn’t protect them! But we have learned from this and our mini-bottle greenhouses worked a treat for protecting other delicate plants from the last frosts of the year.  We have no water source in our garden, and our water butt got emptied quite early on in the dry spell! We carried bottles of water from our classroom to keep the garden going!

We have learned about designing things and planning a space that we first thought was just a “waste land”. We have learned a lot about the history of Loudoun Castle and the theme park, which was interesting to us, as it is right on our doorstep, and we didn’t know much about it.

We had donations from lovely people like a family who donated the kids toys to create our “theme park” and Burn’s nursery in Stewarton who donated flowering plants.  

We are only 2 pupils, we feel really proud that we can achieve this with the support of only one teacher (the crazy plant lady…as we call her! J)…it’s amazing what we can achieve as a trio of people with similar outlooks on life, and huge motivation to make the world a better place.

After the competition we hope that a lot of the flowers we planted will continue to grow every year, like the nasturtiums and marigolds, and this will keep the area in front of the shed looking nice and pretty while also being bug friendly.

We will leave the small, raised bed in place and pass it onto the new S1 pupils for them to have a mini, more manageable veg growing plot to introduce them to Outdoor learning at Loudoun Academy.

We feel really proud because we have created what we planned, and that other people have recognised our hard work. We feel proud that we keep going in the face of vandalism and we rise above the petty destruction to keep improving our garden space and make it look great. We feel proud that we can pass this area onto our new S1 classes and help them then feel proud about the work we all do in the garden at Loudoun Academy.