St. Margaret's School for Girls

Beelief

My garden's story is that you can make space and grow anything, even if you only have a small amount of space to grow things on. Take for example, living in a block of flats or in a crowded city. I chose this story because lots of people don't have much, if any space to grow plants which I think is a shame, because plants can help mental wellbeing and are good for cleaning your air. All of my plants are in pots or recycled containers so it is easy to move around and shows how little space you need for a plant to grow. We tried to maximise the space we used to show this, by making the garden in a cross shape and using the bottom for planting and the top for hanging signs that don’t take up space on the trellis.

Garden pond

Tasty strawberries growing

Lots of colour

I chose this story because during lockdown people had to stay indoors, away from parks and the like so most people created their own Pocket Garden in their house or focused on their garden outdoors, as they became a sanctuary away from the busy household. This was also true for my family and we ate outdoors whenever we could. The box that the garden is in represents the window boxes that people used so often during covid. The box itself is made out of Mr Howitt’s fence that blew down during Storm Arwen. This just shows how, like my garden, trash can be made into treasure.

I chose the name because of the amount of belief and hard work that went into making the garden. I also chose it for the resilience and belief of the people in Scotland and the rest of the UK to get through the lockdown and Covid.

My garden is wildlife friendly because it has a variety of wildflowers and a pond that can be exited via a ramp that lets bugs and other creatures out and in. It also has a variety of bug hotels on the other side some of which are on the ground to allow bugs and other non flying insects to access it. The flowers are also chosen specifically for the attraction for pollinators.
My garden is separated into sections using signage. The side with the bug hotels and the side with the pond are wildlife orientated with a sprinkling of spring onion. The other two sections contain only edible plants, such as lettuce, herbs, beans, peas, chard, alpine strawberries and raspberries.

I reused a lot of materials to make my garden. Most of my containers are plant pots that were holding other plants before we hung them up. I used a lot of milk bottles and a few plastic bottles that were saved from being disposed of. For planting some of the ground plants we used old polystyrene fish boxes that were supplied by Wendy and Jim (our mentors). The signs are made out of cardboard that was going to be recycled in my house and some spare poly pockets we had lying around.

After the competition has finished, my garden will become a permanent fixture and will be used as kitchen gardens and an area for the Juniors to put the plants that they grow yearly. I hope that the garden will continue to flourish as I progress through senior school and leave.

Lots of people volunteered and donated to make this garden come to life. We worked with local garden centres (Ben Reids, Dobbies, The Mains of Drum, Inverurie Garden Centre, Inverurie Homebase) to source materials and some plants. The St Megs community and staff all donated seeds and containers to keep the plants in and sometimes even plants themselves. My friends in my class volunteered to help, which was greatly appreciated as we were nearing the end of the deadline and still had a lot of work.

Whilst creating my garden I learned that teamwork is key because without people coming and volunteering to help and/or donate this garden would not have been possible. Without the help of Wendy, Jim, Mrs Miller (who got me into the competition in the first place), my classmates, Mr and Mrs Howitt (Mr Howitt built the amazing frame with the materials that we supplied), my family and Mrs Wiederman the garden would not look like it is now. In fact, the idea wouldn’t even have occurred to me.