Let's Grow Airedale

Aim

A gardening project to bring the community together to provide beautiful garden areas at Airedale hospital.

Project aim

A gardening project to bring the community together to provide beautiful garden areas at Airedale hospital for patients, staff, family and visitors to enjoy

About the project

We will form the volunteer garden group 'Lets Grow Airedale' and carry out creative and educational gardening activities. Those plant people will work in partnership with Friends of Airedale to manage the project which will promote organic and wildlife friendly gardening techniques and management.

The aim of the project is to bring people together from all walks of life to learn how to garden, make new friends and benefit from healthy exercise in the fresh air. The goal and aspiration for this group will be to improve the green landscape at the hospital whilst learning together.

Many of us, myself included, have had to spend extended periods of time confined to a hospital ward at Airedale hospita

l. The inspiration for this project came whilst staring at a bare courtyard of gravel for several days and wanting to do something about it. In fact, research has shown that even just looking at gardens through a window can improve recovery and wellbeing.

“Being in nature, or even viewing scenes of nature, reduces anger, fear, and

stress and increases pleasant feelings. Exposure to nature not only makes you

feel better emotionally, it contributes to your physical wellbeing, reducing blood

pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and the production of stress hormones. It

may even reduce mortality, according to scientists such as public health researchers

Stamatakis and Mitchell”.

from: Univertisy of Minnesota website

The garden areas will be very diverse, some a wildlife friendly mix of flowering perennials, some herbs and fruit trees and some an annual meadow mix. We hope the garden spaces will contribute to patients recovery and improve the wellbeing of patients and staff.

What your donation will do

-Provide plants, compost and materials for the volunteer sessions and garden areas at the hospital

-Purchase tools such as spades, hand forks and wheelbarrows

-Pay for our time to run volunteer training and masterclasses

......begin to create a beautiful landscape for patients, staff, family and visitors to enjoy

Who we are

We are Pippa and Andrew Chapman, professional horticulturalists and we run a gardeing consultancy and community gardening business in Steeton called Those Plant People.

We need to raise £3000 as a minimum to make this project happen but ideally we would like to raise £15,000 to enable us to make some really special garden spaces at the hospital and to secure the projects longterm future.

If we can raise the funding the project is set to start in mid April/end may, if you are interested in getting involved please contact us at [email protected] or call Pippa on 07704178585

This project closed unsuccessfully on 28th April 2015