We are delighted to announce that the Junior School Gardening Club has achieved the RHS Level 5 School Gardening Award – the highest award in the RHS School Gardening programme!
This award recognises schools that have embedded gardening into school life, work closely with their community, garden throughout the year, and have a sustainable plan for the future. It is a fantastic achievement and reflects the enthusiasm, commitment and hard work of our students.
- To achieve this award, we demonstrated that:
- We garden with our community.
- We garden in every season.
- Our gardening has a sustainable future.
Gardening with Our Community
This year we were delighted to welcome students from a local school to join us for a special gardening workshop. Our Gardening Club members proudly led a tour of our garden, sharing everything they have learned about growing plants and supporting wildlife. They demonstrated how to deadhead calendula flowers before helping our visitors sow their own seeds to take home.
As our visit coincided with World Bee Day, everyone took part in a bee-themed art workshop, creating beautiful charcoal bee drawings inspired by the artist April Coppini. We were also pleased to gift our visitors some of the plants we had propagated in our garden, allowing them to begin their own gardening journey. It was wonderful to see our students confidently sharing their knowledge and inspiring others.
Gardening Throughout the Seasons
Our garden is a busy place all year round. In autumn, we harvested our crops, planted garlic and onions, sowed red clover as a green manure to protect the soil, and collected seeds from kale, calendula and beetroot ready for future growing. Using RHS resources, students carefully made and labelled their own origami seed packets, while fallen leaves were collected to begin creating leaf mould.
Spring brought plenty of sowing, weeding and the rebuilding of our bug hotel to provide habitats for beneficial insects. During the summer term, students continued to care for the garden, harvested produce, organised a whole-school potato growing competition, and completed our successful community outreach project.
Growing for the Future
Our Gardening Club has developed strong foundations for the years ahead. Funding is already in place to continue purchasing compost and seeds, while our growing collection of saved seeds will help make the garden even more sustainable.
Following the success of this year’s outreach event, we look forward to welcoming another local school next year. The whole-school potato competition was also a huge success and is set to become an annual tradition.
Gardening is now supported by a wider team across the school, with staff supporting and promoting the potato competition and next year we plan to allocate some year 6 gardening roles. We have also built a wonderful partnership with our catering team, who helped students prepare and serve produce from our harvest, including potatoes from the competition and our bumper crop of garlic, allowing everyone to enjoy the fruits of our labour.
Looking Ahead
Achieving the RHS Level 5 School Gardening Award is a fantastic milestone, but our gardening journey certainly doesn’t end here. We look forward to continuing to nurture our garden, encourage biodiversity, inspire future gardeners, and strengthen the connections we’ve built within our school and the wider community.
A huge well done to every member of the Gardening Club both past and present. Their enthusiasm, teamwork and dedication have transformed our garden into a thriving space for learning, wildlife and the whole school community. We can’t wait to see what we grow next!
