Community Gardens, Cyrenians

Pip started out by volunteering and is now the Cyrenians Green Activity Co-ordinator at the Community Gardens

How do you like to spend your time outside of work?

I do a lot of walking; I’m also studying for an MSc, so I feel that a lot of my free time is study time as well. I have a garden at home, which doesn’t get as much attention as I’d like to give it at the moment, plus yoga and reading.

Sometimes I sew, I quite enjoy that, and baking.

What activity energises you?

Yoga. There is something about slowing down, being in the present moment and stretching. I’d love to do yoga in the garden here one day.

Are you learning or have learnt anything new recently?

I feel that I learn something new every time I come to the gardens; it’s not just the gardening it’s also the participants that I work with on a daily basis, I feel like I learn infinitely from them.

If you are having a bad day, what would you do to try and turn things around?

If I’m having a hard day, if I’m stressed, if I just touch a pine tree

(laughs) just touch the bark, it really has such an instant effect of connecting you back to your body and the ground and the present moment. I learned that from the people I work with here.

I believe you started off here by volunteering..

When Covid happened, I ended up in Edinburgh. I felt I didn’t have any community here and with it being lockdown it was hard to meet people. Somebody who volunteered in the garden suggested to me to come along to the garden to see how it was, what happened here. So, I came along and yeah, I loved it instantly. It was funny ‘cos it wasn’t necessarily the gardening I was interested in, it was meeting people, and I definitely met people, but also, I loved working in the garden. Planting, touching, seeing things grow. I’d always had an interest but not a passion for it. So that was fantastic.

I’d been looking for jobs at that time as well, thinking about academia or policy, but after about a year of volunteering in the garden I just thought I don’t know if I want to go back to being in an office. I actually really enjoy working with people one to one, and I love the person-centred approach.

Working here ignited another passion?

I’d done a couple of degrees before in psychology, but I wanted to move into work which used a person-centred approach because it’s about the relationship between two people, because it’s what I’d found I had benefited from in volunteering at the garden. It wasn’t something that my previous career or experience had given me, it was never about one to one relationships. And I thought this is something that I really enjoy, something that I seem to be good at, and that I’m really interested in.

Is there a typical day?

There is a structure but within that structure what I do varies dramatically day to day, on the weather, on the people who come to the groups, on the activity we are doing in the group on that day. Yeah, it’s usually wonderful, what we actually do, and that’s one of the joys of the job that it varies so much day to day. On Monday I was picking apples from the Orchard to be identified by the RHS and that’s a job I’ve never done before, and never thought I’d be doing, and I thought how lovely to do that with lots of other lovely people.

What do you take away from the work?

I think, person centred means to benefit the person that you are working with. The more I work with different people the more I can see an adaptive, evolutionary approach is what is required, it’s got so many metaphorical similarities with the garden and one thing I’d love to do is have a connection, for the long term, with therapy and horticulture. Though of course what we do in the community gardens is not therapy.

Some days I come here, and like everybody I have better or worse days. And what I found is that sometimes you think this is a bit hard, the weather is bad, or this is a challenging situation, but I keep coming back and it always somehow gets better. It’s almost like, as long as I keep coming and I’m present, things change and improve.

So sometimes when I come to the group session or working with somebody, and I’m maybe not feeling the best that day, I think to myself I have to be on good form because this is for the other person. I found that if I’m honest and say that I’m not having the best day, actually other people in the group can really surprise me with something they say, or something they have learnt or their attitude, or some characteristic they bring. Yeah, it does me a great deal of good. It’s like sometimes my job is to uplift other people but at other times they do that for me!