Volunteers from Transition Town Wellington (TTW) are out in the rain on Fox’s Field this morning – there’s always work to be done, whatever the weather. Five years back, this 8.5-acre field was just rough grass and nettles; today, it’s a thriving forest garden encircled by a food hedge, or “fedge”. Saplings we’d planted as knee‑high muddy twigs now spread their branches above us. There are winding woodchip pathways, a riot of herbs, seven‑foot high cardoons holding their fat black seedheads up to the lowering sky.
We’re clearing the grass and old hay from on top of the black plastic clearance mulch, heaving it into wheelbarrows and piling it up into new heaps to make compost for next year’s mulch.
Helen directs operations with her usual cheerful efficiency. Robin uncovers a stash of hazelnuts, each one opened as neatly as a can of beans. Jay is heaving the heaped barrow to and fro, leaving deep squelchy boot prints in the plastic as she goes. Diana almost disappears under a gigantic dock plant on her shoulder, carting it off to the hedge to chuck – don’t want that in the compost. Maya spots a clump of shiny dark brown fungi that we all fail to identify. I find a squirming worm under the rotting hay, moist as a tongue, tasting the soil with its whole body. A robin flits around, eager to see what these busy humans have unearthed.
The Transition Town Wellington group celebrate their RHS award. Photograph: Jeremy McCluskey
We pause for a break and to congratulate each other on the news that we have just won a Royal Horticultural Society award for sustainable gardening. This is one of five community awards, shining a light not just on horticultural excellence, but on the many benefits that gardening can bring to people and the natural world around them.
There’s a sweetness to the win. But more than that, it is wonderful to feel that we are part of a grassroots movement – ordinary people like us across the country, working together to care for the land and each other. TTW doesn’t own this land, but we are its guardians and, tea break over, we get back to work.
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