The Leigh Jubilee Garden
Blooming Marvellous
In May, a team of Year 12 IBCP students from Attenborough College, working with students from Milestone@The Leigh, began creating the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Garden and Orchard in a prominent but unused site right outside the main entrance to the academy. Starting with a large, empty area of grass, students worked with representatives from Dartford Friends of the Earth and Dartford’s Growing Community Project to mark out where the kitchen garden would be planted, till the ground, compost the new growing beds they had created and then plant our first crop of vegetables. Since then, students have been mulching the beds and watering them daily, as well as tending to the new plants. By the summer holiday, a standpipe will have been installed and the students will have put in place a drip irrigation system to water the garden over the holiday.
When we return in September, students will then help to erect a shed in which to store the gardening equipment and put in place two benches. One will have an arbour to grow a yellow rambling rose to memorialise Mrs Sue Blackston, who worked in our academy kitchen for almost 30 years before she tragically died in the pandemic. The other will be a commemorative bench named in honour of Captain Sir Tom Moore, who was a popular choice when students were promoting their chosen college figureheads earlier this year. This bench will be sited overlooking part of the garden that has been set aside to create a new wildlife pond during the 2022-23 academic year. This autumn, phase 2 of the development of the garden and orchard will begin, when not only the pond will be created but a small orchard of fruit-bearing trees will be planted.
It is intended that the Jubilee Garden will become not only a beautiful location in the academy, which we hope will bring joy and access to nature to staff and students, but a productive growing area from which students will be able to harvest fruit and vegetables that they can use to cook in Food lessons and understand the journey that our food takes from ground to plate. We are also hopeful that the increased biodiversity will benefit the academy site and that the increase in planting will help to mitigate against the car pollution we experience on a daily basis. We are confident that the garden and orchard will be a fitting and lasting tribute to our country’s longest reigning monarch.
A prime motivator for us in creating the garden and orchard was to develop students’ understanding of the IB Learner Profile of being BALANCED, which aims to help young people appreciate their interdependence on one another and the world in which they live. In an increasingly urbanised area like Dartford, we believe it is important to bring nature into the lives of our community and are looking forward to launching the academy’s new after-school gardening club in September. This environmental project is also well-timed to coincide with the adoption of Sir David Attenborough as the figurehead for Attenborough College, the new Post-16 college at the academy.
This project has greatly benefitted from the enthusiasm of Mr Forcella-Burton and his IBCP students, who are participating in it as the Service Learning element of their IB programme of study. It has been wonderful to have another joint-venture with Milestone@The Leigh and to be able to acquire two new community partners in Dartford Friends of the Earth and Dartford’s Growing Community Project. We are also extremely grateful to a local company, CRT Services, who decided to make their annual company charitable donation to the project because the owners’ son loves attending Milestone@The Leigh so much. Their donation is making phase 1 of the project possible.
If you would like to help take the garden to the next stage, you can either donate unwanted but serviceable items of gardening equipment via main reception or make a financial donation via the official fundraising site.
