Ardvreck Primary School

The Living Garden, hosted by the Garden for Life Forum promotes wildlife friendly gardening. Schools were invited to design a small garden including celebrating the 2017 year of History, Heritage and Archaeology. Guarded by a willow dinosaur, coastal cottages and gardens rise up through farms and forests to mountains in this garden design, showing the rich diversity of Scottish habitats and plants.

Handmade Saltires

Miniature croft houses

Handmade bees

Pupils from Ardvreck Primary School visited the local garden centre in March to source seeds for their Pocket Garden. The centre manager was interested to hear about their project and kindly donated several packets of seeds.

Pupils sowed the seeds and took them home to nurture over the Easter holidays.  One of the grandfathers of a pupil helped to design our structure to support the tyres. It was then assembled at the school, ready for planting.

Pupils began planting into the mountain structure including Bere barley which dates back to 8th century Scotland and can only be sourced from Orkney.

They were thrilled when the college offered to provide some seeds. Pupils worked with local enterprise Remake who supplied scrap materials for planting and bumblebees.

One of the pupils’ grannies found several pieces to add to the design on a seashore scavenge. She is a keen gardener and member of RHS, and has also sourced some of the coastal plants in this Pocket Garden.

Filling the tyres with soil

Painting is fun!

Carefully placing plants

This Pocket Garden features plants and herbs planted in a stack of reused tyres on a pallet base.  A grandparent helped to construct the base and pupils filled the tyres with soil and plants they grew themselves.