See the impact your donations and custom have made so far.
Heaton Street Gardens
Our flagship project in Heaton keeps expanding at an ever-growing pace, with our waiting list now at over 70 households-long! Located in the east of Newcastle upon Tyne, the project continues to transform the local area and strengthen community cohesion through a network of colourful, container-based mini-gardens full of organically grown vegetables and pollinator-friendly flowers which are looked after by local residents. As part of the project, we also deliver hands-on horticultural education and provide ongoing, easily-accessible support and helpful materials to the recipients to ensure their first steps on the gardening journey are fun, engaging and successful. Make sure to pay us a visit if you are in the area - hopefully we can inspire you to start your own tiny allotment on your doorstep!
Stanton St. Lounge Grounds Transformation
Thanks to the amazing generosity of local residents, businesses, our customers, friends, family and social media followers, we successfully crowd-funded over £7,300 to improve the gardens of the Stanton Street Lounge - a local community hub and move-on accommodation serving those who experienced extended periods of homelessness and financial hardship. Working in partnership with the Home Group and supported by a group of fantastic volunteers, we weeded over 75 metres of borders and planted them up with hundreds of pollinator-friendly perennials, shrubs, rose bushes, climbers and several metres of hedging. We can’t wait to see the space once the plants fill up!
Free Community Library
Using nothing but second-hand materials and a bit of online inspiration, we created a tiny free library for our local community in Heaton. Our post about it received over 3,200 likes on the local community page and the interest the library generates seems to match the warm reception, with hundreds of second-hand books having already been rehomed and saved from the bin. Heck, we even had a local author dropping off a copy of their newly published novel at our library - a world premiere! True to our mission of spreading horticultural knowledge, we also make sure to keep the library topped up with quality gardening books to make growing food and other plants that tiny bit easier and less scary to anyone who’d like to take their first steps on their gardening adventure. We also couldn’t help ourselves and paired the library up with one of our hand-made planters to keep it stable and add another dash of colour for the passerby to enjoy. All things going well, we would love to create and install one of these on every local street!
Everyturn Estate Improvements
Earlier in 2024 we partnered up with Everyturn Mental Health - one of the largest providers of mental health care in the North East - to help improve the aesthetic appeal and increase the biodiversity across a number of their estates and residential properties. The result? Thousands of flowering bulbs and dozens of pollinator-friendly perennials planted across old and newly developed borders, frogs returning to the recently rejuvenated pond for the first time in years, colourful planters with perennials dotting staff areas, wildflower patches created on each estate during the summer, green Sedum roof installed to reduce water run-off, and a comprehensive 5-year biodiversity action plan created to further increase the value for wildlife over the next several seasons.
George Street Social Vertical Garden
One of our more unusual projects to date, the vertical garden at George Street Social - a safe place for people recovering from alcohol, drugs and other addictions - saw us convert an empty gap under a staircase into a vertical space filled with 160 low-maintenance evergreen perennials, with a focus on resilient, pollinator-friendly species to serve as a haven for bees, butterflies and other insects in an otherwise paved-up neighbourhood. The garden now brightens up the area for the service users, staff, local residents, pedestrians and students from the nearby Newcastle College campus.
Chillingham Rd. Primary School Planters
In April 2024 we helped the Chillingham Rd. Primary School give their street planters a new lease of life! We weeded, removed dead trees, pruned an existing holly shrub and topped the containers up with fresh compost, before planting them up with a mix of pollinator-friendly perennials, bulbs, and two apple trees which have since produced a bumper crop of delicious James Grieve and Fiesta variety apples. The planters are now looked after by the pupils from the school’s gardening club (with a helping hand from Mr. Thompson!) and are full of colour for most of the year!
The Potting Shed
As busy gardeners, we naturally end up with a lot of various gardening materials and implements in our storage - be it leftovers from jobs we did for our customers or things that were kindly donated by local residents. Thankfully, there is always someone in need of the many items we have in our collection and to date we have given away innumerable plastic pots, trays, modules, nearly-expired seed packets, bamboo canes, jute twine, garden netting, weed suppressing membranes and lots more, saving bags’ worth of plastic from going to waste and providing free essentials to those who may have otherwise not been able to afford buying them from a garden centre. We love being a bustling collection hub and always enjoy the inevitable gardening-related chat we end up having with those who visit us to pick up something from our stores.
Your garden!
Finally, let’s not forget that just through your loyal custom, over the last two years we managed to:
recycle several tonnes of your weeds into compost through the Sandhills Garden Waste facility.
sow, propagate and plant thousands of shrubs, bulbs, perennials, hedging and free-standing trees, fruit trees and vegetables.
install dozens of beautiful wooden containers and hand-made wildlife features
All these actions will provide invaluable habitats and sources of food for local wildlife, reduce water run-off, trap air pollutants, improve soil quality, recycle nutrients, yield fruit, herbs and vegetables, beautify local neighbourhoods and benefit your mental health - all while making your garden a beautiful and relaxing space. We look forward to expanding these numbers even more in the coming year!
Photography by Damien Wootten, Thomas Burrow, Southern Green & ReGreen CIC.