QE receives RHS School Gardening Award

After pupils and staff put their back into weeks of work at the new QE allotment, the School has been given the RHS School Gardening Award Level 1.

The QE plot at the Byng Road community allotments is already planted up with potatoes, strawberries and asparagus.

The School chose today to announce its receipt of the award because it is internationally recognised as Earth Day – a day dedicated to raising environmental awareness and encouraging sustainability.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Our new School plan, Boundless, has as one of its six priorities that we will help our pupils become ‘sustainability-literate’: what better example of that could there be than this gardening project?

“It is good to see that our allotment has so quickly become a vibrant hub of learning, teamwork, and environmental action.”

Among those enthusiastically backing the project is Year 13’s Shailen Patel, who has contributed the grant he won as part of a Jack Petchey Foundation Environmental Award.

Others, both inside and outside the School, have variously donated time, tools, materials and encouragement.

The work has involved much preparation of the ground. The first rewards of all this labour have already come with the emergence of the first asparagus spears.

The RHS  level 1 award recognises: that those involved understand the benefits of gardening; that the growing space is accessible for those with disabilities; and that the gardening work has actually started. Recipients are sent a copy of Your Wellbeing Garden, an RHS book, and a packet of seeds.

Earth Day, which this year has the theme of Our Power, Our Planet, is concentrating on collective, citizen-led actions to drive environmental change.

Earth Day marks the climax of Earth Month, which is celebrated every April.