Malus trilobata leaf in autumn by Howard Rice
Friends’ News A Garden Room for the Schools’ Garden Garden Escapes
A new purpose-built classroom, to be known as the Geoffrey and Eileen Adams Garden Room, is planned for the Schools’ Garden. The Garden Room will transform our capacity for introducing schoolchildren to the natural world and drive forward our mission to help teachers integrate plants into teaching across the Curriculum.
Scheme design for the Geoffrey and Eileen Adams Garden Room The Schools’ Garden has quickly become a productive, creative and safe space where schoolchildren can enjoy getting mud under the fingernails with hands-on fruit and vegetable gardening, be introduced to the concepts of biodiversity and responsible citizenship through discovering the ecosystems at work, and enjoy learning in an outdoor environment. We are very grateful to the many Friends and Corporate Friends who donated time and finance to get the Schools’ Garden growing, including the volunteers from Cambridge law firm, Mills & Reeve, who dug over the overgrown plot, and Peter Groeneveld of PG Horticulture who made the lead donation to turn the plan on paper into reality. The proposed Garden Room will add a creative, child-oriented learning space for 36 pupils together with essential facilities such as a small kitchen for cooking meals from the harvested fruit and veg, together with provision for coats, lunchboxes and WCs. This will enable us to offer a year-round, allweather schools programme and extend the ways in which plant diversity, horticulture and plant science can enrich and inform young lives. With the doors flung wide open in good weather, the ability to make observations and experiments out in the Schools’ Garden that can be immediately investigated further indoors, surrounded by shelves of natural finds like coloured bark, seedheads and pinecones,
moulted grass snake skins, last year’s birds’ nests, reference resources and walls of drawings and photos, will make for a potent, inspirational combination. Simple things like having a dedicated space where children can have their lunch will mean schools from further afield can come to the Garden and sufficient WC provision will mean that time is not wasted traipsing up and down to the Glasshouse Range. New experimental plantings will be developed: displays of nasturtium and lady’s mantle will encourage investigation of hydrophobic leaf surfaces, for example, and mini meadows are brilliant for small scale biodiversity surveys. The Garden Room will also become our centre for delivering continuing professional development courses for teachers in the region, helping them realize the potential in their school grounds for teaching across the Curriculum. For example, learning plant names and labelling crops can be used for developing language and literacy skills; bed layout, plant spacing and crop rotation planning are perfect for reinforcing maths and IT skills; and, flower and herb growing can be used as the basis of school enterprise projects. Use of the Garden Room will not be restricted to term time, however. We envisage that many of our family and community activities will also find a home here. Top of the list will
be to restructure and enlarge our Gardening Club, an after school group for children from the local area who want to learn about plants and how to grow and care for them. The Geoffrey and Eileen Adams Garden Room has been so named to thank the extraordinary generosity of Chris and Sarah Adams. Mr and Mrs Adams are already members of the ViceChancellor’s Circle in recognition of their generosity to Mr Adams’s undergraduate college, Pembroke. Mr Adams says that his time at Cambridge transformed his life, made him ask questions and be curious, the qualities we hope to encourage in children visiting the Garden. After discovering the tree collection here, Mr and Mrs Adams were inspired to contribute a game-changing £150,000 to the Garden Room in memory of Mr Adams’s parents, who made a beautiful garden in Sussex of acid-loving rhododendrons and azaleas, and from whom he inherited a love of gardening and a curiosity about the natural world. This modest, single-storey and environmentally-sensitive building will nevertheless have a huge impact on our schools provision. The proposal is currently under consideration by the Cambridge City Council. With fingers crossed for planning permission, we hope to start on site by Christmas so as to be ready to make the most of the 2015 growing season. Friends’ News – Issue 96 – September 2014