We had an enjoyable afternoon at this week’s ‘ Volunteering Mini Fair’ at the Berwickshire High School. It was good to meet up with S5 and S6 pupils and show them the work we do. There was a fair amount of interest in our before and after photographs. It was also great opportunity to tell them about the new Flowerbed Trail.
They were a nice bunch of kids who seemed to enjoy themselves.
A busy morning with the team weeding the beds after the rain brought a zillion of the pesky things to the surface. The sun shone and we achieved a lot! Also got to enjoy loads of beautiful Red Admiral and Peacock butterflies at the Crab Apple tree bed. Replaced a poor Hebe, which had been damaged, with a lovely blue Campanula donated by someone earlier in the year. A huge thank you to all who donate plants for us to spread around town. That’s the great thing about herbaceous plants – they get too big for the original spot and need to be split up and moved on. Plants just keep giving! Keep an eye open around the beds, you might spot something that is also in your own garden.
‘Last night we held a ‘thank you’ event for our volunteers and for our garden owners who so generously opened their gardens to the public to make Duns third ‘Open Garden’ event on behalf of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme, held on Sunday 18th June, such a success and what a lovely evening we had! The ‘fizz’ was flowing and the nibbles completely vanished amid chatter and laughter. In 2022 the charity we championed was Abundant Borders and Duns Community Garden, helping them to take on five students from Berwickshire High School to train towards Horticultural achievements. This has been so successful that two of the students are now going on to study at Newtown St Boswells Agricultural College after the summer holidays. Congratulations to Karen Birch and her team for their hard work and dedication encouraging the next generation towards a career in Agriculture and Rural Studies. Karen talked us through a power point presentation about the work they have done, and are still doing, which was inspiring and emotional and was thoroughly enjoyed by us all. This year our champions are Duns Community Nursery and Riding for Disabled Association (RDA). Nicola, Rachel and Jo collected the donation for the nursery, which is to go towards a large dining table with chairs to enable all the children to enjoy lunch together. Our donation to the RDA will be put towards the enormous amount to be raised to resurface the indoor school where all forty of the adults and children who attend benefit from working with the horses. Gill, Sharon and Sandra were there to receive the RDA donation. We wish them all the very best for the coming years and thank them for all the hard work they do in our community.’
What a fantastic day we had on Sunday! The promised rain held off and we had a steady stream of people wandering around town looking lost and having fun. The trail was quite spread out this year but there were plenty of parking areas marked out and lots of people took advantage of that. A big ‘thank you’ to Pearsons for allowing us to use the staff car park all afternoon – that was a great help. We’ve added a selection of pictures from the 12 gardens visited – all very different and all truly lovely. In the end we made just over £1000 which is a fantastic amount. 40% of this figure goes to Scotland’s Gardens Scheme nominated charities and 60% goes to our two charities. This year we chose Duns Community Nursery and our local Riding for Disabled Association based near Auchincrow. Two wonderful organisations doing such great work so thank you all who attended and bought tickets, I know the two charities are very grateful. We were also very honoured to have our own TV celebrity from Beechgrove Garden, George Anderson, visit a good number of gardens, and I know he and his wife had a lovely afternoon – because I asked him!
Huge ‘thank you’ to all our volunteers and, of course, to the owners who opened their gardens to allow total strangers access to what is normally their own area of escape from the world.
