4 minute read
Colin Dower - Senior Groundsman
SENIOR GROUNDSMAN Colin Dower
Colin grew up in the small Cornish village of Porkellis, near Helston, in a very rural setting. He first got involved with gardening as a young boy, helping his father in their large garden. Colin carried on this interest at Helston School, where he studied a subject called Rural Studies. Although his friends did not find the subject very interesting, Colin enjoyed it and went on to pass the exam. During the holidays, Colin would complete the 18-mile round trip on his bicycle from home to school to look after the school greenhouses and veg plots.
Colin left school in the Easter of 1974. After a couple of weeks his father spotted an advert in the West Briton for a groundsman / gardener at Truro School. He went for an interview with the Bursar, Mr Jock Appleton (TS 1958-1979), who showed him around the school, which Colin explains was “a very different school compared to today”, before asking him “when can you start?” “My first day was 12 July 1974 – yes, 47 years ago - and I’ve been here ever since. In the early years it was an allboys school with Wednesday afternoon off and Saturday morning school. The headmaster at that time was Mr Derek Burrell (TS Head 1959-1986), with Mr Alan Ayres (TS 1955-1988) at Treliske, as it was then. The main school site has changed a lot - there was no sports hall, an outdoor swimming pool, and an athletics track where the Sir Ben Ainslie Sports Centre is now, no Astro, no Burrell Theatre, no Wilkes Building and an old wooden cricket pavilion with a tin roof that mysteriously burnt down in 1977.”
Prior to the blaze, Colin tended to the roses that grew in front of the cricket pavilion, and remembers the morning after finding a gas canister which had been split in half by the fire and flung 200 meters across the cricket pitch! Luckily no one was injured.
“One other big change was Epworth Close. Where these houses now sit used to be the school allotment where a man called Mr Mike Osmand looked after the school allotment to keep the kitchens supplied with veg. Mr Osmand also looked after the school pigs – yes, real pigs! They would be fed all the waste from the kitchens.”
Colin’s favourite memory of Truro School was the night of the solar eclipse campout in August 1999. “The sports fields were home to hundreds of tents, a small town of campers all here for the big event.”
In 2002, Colin moved over to the Truro School Prep site where he has created most of what you see in the gardens today. When he arrived, most of the site consisted of large trees and grassy areas of shrubs. One of Colin’s first projects at the Prep School was the ‘Head’s Garden’, which had become unused and overrun by brambles. Colin has taken back control and transformed the area into a colourful flowerbed with additional space for car parking.
One of the most noticeable of Colin’s projects is the brightly coloured corner flowerbed at the entrance of the Prep School. It took Colin 12 months to clear the tree stumps and build the shield- shaped raised bed which currently contains 300 New Guinea busy lizzies. Colin explained this is a seasonal bed, and he looks to change the flowers in the autumn to replace them with bulbs ready for spring.
The woods which line either side of the Prep driveway become a carpet of bluebells in springtime. This variety are wild English bluebells, which have naturally established themselves in the woods over the years. Colin leaves them to grow naturally but maintains the woods around them, so they are visible from the drive.
Although Colin keeps the grounds modern with brightly coloured flower beds, there are still glimpses into their history; from the section of tiles remaining in the dining room patio as a reminder of the conservatory which once stood there, to the granite roller which Colin salvaged from the earth dug out to make way for the Lovett Building foundations in 2018. Recently, many of Colin’s projects have taken an ecological approach, with the aim of increasing the biodiversity on the site. He has done this by bringing old tree stumps and logs from the woods to create habitats for critters, as well as introducing flowers such as goldenrod to attract a wide array of bee species. The students have been getting involved too, having built a bug hotel for which Colin supplied the materials, using wooden pallets, bricks and bits of pottery he has dug up around the site over the years.
