Together we garden, together we learn

29 OCTOBER 2020 BY CAROL COSTELLO

It’s not hard to believe that many children living in urban areas have little knowledge of where their food comes from if their only experience is helping mom or dad pick out plastic-wrapped fruit and veg in the supermarket.

When we were commissioned by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to design a new learning Centre and at their RHS Garden Hyde Hall in Essex, the education team told us stories of children discovering how vegetables grew for the first time, describing the utter surprise of wide-eyed kids pulling up carrots from the earth or plucking peas from a pod.

The RHS needed a new purpose-built place to support education of children on school trips and of teachers who would go back to their schools and set up learning gardens. This is all part of the RHS School Gardening Campaign which has been running since 2007. The aim of the campaign is to teach life skills around the theme of the three Rs: Ready to Learn, Resilience and Responsibility. Learning gardens are a tool for educating about science, maths, nutrition and how to work together. You could say that instilling gardening skills at a young age is at the heart of the RHS’ mission ‘to enrich everyone’s life through plants and make the UK a greener and more beautiful place’.

Gardens have played an important part in many Cullinan buildings. Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Newcastle has a beautiful courtyard garden and a garden on its roof. The roof-top garden has been purposely planted with a privet hedge along its perimeter, partly for privacy, but ultimately because it requires regular trimming; the intent being that this is done by someone living with cancer for its therapeutic benefits. Our practice founder, Ted Cullinan, devised this idea having been both a keen gardener and a cancer survivor. He knew the value of this activity, how it can help with physical and mental wellbeing, and passed his knowledge on through incorporating hedge-trimming in the design.

Ted was not the only one from our office who had a garden lesson to pass on. About five years ago, Robin Nicholson instigated a guerrilla garden on a miserable strip of dirt on the towpath running along our canal-side office that has flourished through his determination, but also through teaching others here at Cullinan Studio how to garden and pitch in. Walkers, joggers, cyclists often stop to compliment its beauty - striking up conversation, connecting us to local people and boosting the wellbeing of our workplace.

I came to gardening in the middle of my life through a community garden project set up with funds from Incredible Edible Lambeth. The funding allowed my community to transform a small piece of land on our south London council estate, which was mainly used by dog owners, into a vegetable plot with raised beds, compost bins and water butts. I have learned so much through participating in this project over five years, working with neighbours of all ages. We have successes and failures depending on weather, fungus, pests. Because the garden is right on the street, we get lots of tips from passers-by and these tips lead to other conversations about the estate, the neighborhood or about the past - what someone used to grow back home whether that be Jamaica, Bosnia or Mexico. Many people just smile when they see it. A key lesson I have learned is that gardening is best done together; we have to learn it from someone. It’s knowledge that is passed through generations, it’s in our DNA and when you get your hands dirty you re-awaken the ancestors.

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