We were intrigued by the title ‘Nature’s Engineers’ and all the more so when we started looking at all the ways in which nature works. We based our garden on an osprey’s nest, using branches from a shrub that grows (far too prolifically) in my garden and twigs we gathered from round the school.

Our idea was to have a trellis at the back, representing a spider-web and to grow the beans and peas up it. Some of the design team were very keen to have what they called a canopy over the garden, and that evolved into another web arched between two shrubs planted on each side of the nest and over which the sweet-peas would grow – they made this themselves.

We have a little bird-bath with stones around representing a penguin nest, and we made toadstools from recycled bowls and empty glue-sticks to illustrate nature’s way of using bright colours to indicate poison.

We put together the garden on a rare sunny day - and how lovely to hear the children exclaim in delight when they saw a bee landing on one of the sunflowers.

We were able to use wood chippings as the base - ageing trees within our grounds had been felled and the chippings left behind.

We sowed our first seeds at the very end of February and were able to use an enclosed corridor that faces the sun and our seeds absolutely loved it there, keeping us busy potting them up. We planted beans, peas, sweet-peas, peppers, carrots, radishes, sunflowers and tomatoes. We didn’t expect our sunflowers to bloom so early, but were absolutely delighted to see them all appear in good time. Beans and pea-pods have appeared and the carrots are well developed.

Our favourite part of creating the garden was seeing the seeds all growing so well.