Help nature thrive with Triangle Garden Club!

Aim

Help our Triangle Garden Clubs to boost biodiversity, create richer habitats, help pollinators and build community resilience

Help nature thrive with Triangle Garden Club!

Boosting biodiversity - supporting wellbeing - building resilience 

Who we are:

We are the Triangle Community Garden, a charity based in Hitchin, Herts, that brings people together to enjoy community gardening and boost local biodiversity.
Our nature-based projects help people improve their life chances and care for nature through community gardening: whether through social therapeutic horticulture, nature-based volunteering opportunities, skills workshops, outdoor community events, forest school activities, bushcraft for teens, wildlife walks and talks or biodiversity projects.
We are raising funds to run our Garden Clubs, where volunteers of all ages and abilities develop and tend our community gardens under the guidance of an experienced horticulturist. The community gardens are open to all and part of a public park: Ransoms Recreation Ground. Our beautiful, productive and biodiverse spaces include a forest garden, nature garden, allotments, meadows and a wildlife pond. Meeting every week, with an additional family-friendly session every month, our Garden Clubs encourage our community to come together outdoors to ‘connect, grow, enjoy’.

What your support will mean:

Nature is in trouble! We need your help to boost biodiversity locally and help nature thrive!

Your support will ensure that our Garden Clubs can continue to work together enhancing our community green spaces to restore nature, support people's wellbeing and strengthen local resilience.

Here are some of the ways our Garden Clubs help nature thrive in our local park:

• Planting new areas with pollinator- and wildlife-friendly planting
• Planting new trees and shrubs we plant and ensuring they survive in challenging conditions
• Enhancing and maintaining our pond for maximum biodiversity
• Controlling aggressive species so a greater diversity of species can thrive
• Planting bulbs and sowing wildflowers to support pollinators
• Making bug hotels, bird and bat nesting boxes and habitat piles

By creating biodiverse habitats and strong communities, our Garden Clubs are supporting climate mitigation and adaptation in equal measure. As well as increasing biodiversity we will be:

• Encouraging our community to take an interest in caring for the natural world, leading to greater environmental responsibility
• Teaching participants how best to support nature through the seasons in their own lives
• Increasing people’s understanding of the essential ecosystem services that nature provides and that we depend on to survive

Our Garden Clubs also reduce social isolation and increase wellbeing by bringing people together to work in nature. As the RHS notes, community gardening can bring nature and biodiversity back to our doorsteps as well as unify communities and improve people's health and wellbeing1.

Our Garden Clubs embody these outcomes. Your support will help us continue to make a real difference by bringing people together to connect with nature and enhance biodiversity.

1. Royal Horticultural Society (2025) Space to Grow. RHS Retrieved 21 February 2026, from http://www.rhs.org.uk/get-involved/community-gardening/spacetogrow

What we need from you:

We need your help to fund our efforts. Here's how your donations can help:

• A £25 donation will pay for 10 pairs of gardening gloves for our volunteers
• A £50 donation will pay for materials to build 2 vandal-proof bug hotels (from sturdy rubble-filled gabion cages)
• A £100 donation will pay for a broad selection of seasonal flowering plants to help pollinators across the year
• A £150 donation will pay for one half day Garden Club session, to enable local volunteers to work together to restore nature in our community
• A £250 donation will pay for the creation of 20m2 of wildflower meadow
  

We are initially aiming to raise £5000 which will enable us to pay for 25 weekly Friday Garden Club sessions and 7 monthly Sunday sessions, covering staffing, overheads, materials and equipment. Additional amounts raised will allow us to fund further sessions. Please help us deliver this much needed project for people and nature in our community.

Why are we doing this?

Nature is in trouble. And when nature is in trouble, so are we. We depend on nature for clean air and water, food, and climate regulation. It's no exaggeration to say that we rely on nature to survive.

According to the 2023 State of Nature Report, the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries in the world, with one in six species at risk of being lost from Great Britain. 

There is still time to turn this around. Much of the damage is reversible, and nature can bounce back, given a helping hand. And that’s where our Garden Clubs can really make a difference at a local level.

And as well as providing a haven for nature, our community spaces are also a source of enjoyment and wonder for local people of all ages, including school children, families, and people with additional needs.

A parent commented:
"Being out in nature is so therapeutic for both my neurodiverse daughter and my wellbeing as a parent carer. Being outdoors and doing something practical has helped my daughter with her anxiety and without it would be quite socially isolated from real human interactions."

Our Forest School leader is also very supportive:
“The natural environment of the Triangle Garden's spaces are very important to participants of our forest school and teenage bushcraft sessions.”

Garden Club participants also recognise the wellbeing benefits of working together in the community garden. Here’s what they've said about attending:

“I arrive stressed and tired, and leave relaxed and happy”

“When I came to the Triangle Garden my mental health was poor, I constantly felt tired and anxious and felt I had no time or motivation to do anything about it. Initially, just meeting the staff and volunteers was reassuring, as they were all friendly and calm, with a passion for the project that was contagious.

"[The Garden Club leader] spent time showing me around the forest garden and sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm about the different plants, their purpose within the garden, what they produced and how this was used. It was fascinating and inspiring, a magical place to forget the stresses of daily life and feel at one with nature.

"I learn something new each week about gardening and nature, which has motivated me to get out walking more in nature and grow my own food this year.”

“Lovely to connect with nature and do something useful with lovely people” 

The Triangle Community Garden has a proven track record of creating grassroots initiatives that improve the environment and people's wellbeing in our community.

Donating to our Garden Clubs will help us continue to put this knowledge and experience into action to help people and nature here in North Herts.

Here are the changes we want to see:

This funding will enable our Garden Clubs to continue to improve our community gardens for people and nature. This covers a range of improvements including boosting biodiversity in our Forest Garden and Community Nature Garden by adding new diverse understorey planting and holding back more aggressive species. 

Elsewhere in the park we are transforming a large area of species-poor grassland, where our Garden Clubs will help to 

• create, tend and monitor new areas of wildflower meadow 
• plant an extensive new woodland edge habitat and ensure it thrives 
• create a new willow withy with colourful winter stems for use in basketry

Your donations will provide volunteering opportunities for up to 15 people per week within our Garden Clubs. 

As well as boosting biodiversity, these changes will benefit hundreds of local people including:

• Garden Club volunteers who will benefit from improved physical and mental health, improved sense of purpose and reduced social isolation.
• Children and families attending our weekend Garden Clubs will gain a deeper understanding of the importance of caring for nature. 
• Our forest school and teenage bushcraft participants will benefit from a more naturalistic and diverse environment for their activities
• Our Growing Ability groups (people with additional needs) will enjoy seeing the environment improve, and being able to observe more wildlife activity
• Local park users will benefit from more flowers, more trees, more wildness and more winter interest – all of which were mentioned in a 2024 survey as improvements our community would like to see.
• Commuters who walk or cycle through the park to the station will enjoy seeing the improvements and learn about why we're doing this from our noticeboards
• Dog walkers will enjoy walking through a more naturalistic landscape in the park
• Nature will benefit from all the proposed interventions. We will conduct annual citizen surveys of flora and fauna each summer to monitor progress and ensure what we are doing is having the desired effect.
• Everyone in the community will benefit from the improvement in their local greenspace and a greater understanding of our dependence on the natural world

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made