Cowgate Under 5s

Winner: 2018 Best Garden for Wildlife

Bottle cap decorations

Native plants

Willow border

Every garden has a story to tell about the people who helped make it, the challenges faced, solutions found, lessons learned and the unexpected pleasures along the way.  Learning naturally. Inspired by plants that the children see growing wild in their outdoor spaces, this celebration of life on land is populated by minibeasts and has food for people and wildlife including, nettles and wild strawberries.  Here is Cowgate Under 5s Pocket Garden Story in their own words. 

Cowgate’s Pocket Garden connects children’s experience of native plants and wildlife from our nature kindergarten site at Bonaly, with our city centre nursery garden.

We are using plants already growing at nursery as well as newly bought native plants that match those seen in the wild and which will transfer to our garden after the show.

Nursery staff are donating plants grown at home and we have sourced the pallets and wood
through a play charity and beach combing. Children have been decorating the garden structure using recycled material. They have been keeping plants watered and have repotted some using our wormery compost.

We have Lottery funding to develop our nursery garden and create community planters in a public space. We have grown and selected plants for the pocket garden that will be replanted in our own garden, which will feed our community and attract wildlife to theheart of the city.

We have selected plants that we see and experience in our different nursery outdoor experiences, which can feed people or wildlife including “jaggy” nettles and poisonous Foxgloves and wild strawberries. We have also used compost created by our wormery and compost bin. We have grown plants from seeds in our greenhouse or source plants locally at Inch Nursery.

Watering plants

Newspaper bedding

Homemade compost

Building the base