Pupils’ ingenious garden on display
Green design competition
Greenfingered Cowie Primary School pupils have been planting ideas in the heads of visitors to a national event.
In February, the P3s entered Scotland’s ‘Design a One Planet Picnic Pocket Garden Competition’ and was picked as one of 20 winning schools from across the country to take their project to Gardening Scotland’s recent show in Edinburgh.
For the third year running, Keep Scotland Beautiful joined forces with members of the Garden for Life Forum and Gardening Scotland to run the competition, which involves school pupils aged 3-18 being invited to design a pallet-sized pocket garden.
The competition gave pupils an opportunity to investigate plants and food, develop creative design skills and apply that knowledge to create a sustainable garden.
It also linked to the primary’s EcoSchools Scotland work, as well as work on food and the environment, biodiversity, water, school grounds, global citizenship and understanding the value of stable ecosystems to food production.
The garden also had to take into account the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development. The judges were particularly impressed with the layout and selection of plants and loved the concept of linking plants and features to the goals and using well-known but “often overlooked” plants such as dock leaves.
Their garden was designed with bugs and insects as a secondary theme.
Teacher Holly Cousins said: “The children came up with some fantastic ideas to represent each global goal to creat the ultimate bug goals. The garden included a banana tip for the bugs to eat lots of yummy banana peels, a large bug house base consisting of the ‘bug school, community centre and workplace’ and a white lily as a peace flag for all the bugs to live in harmony.
“The materials were upcycled by the children, such as old yogurt pots and plastic bags. The children wrote letters to Morrisons and were awarded with a voucher, which was greatly appreciated.
“The children have enjoyed painting, planting and making props – their creativity has exceeded all expectations. I am very impressed with their enthusiasm. They voluntarily put time in during some lunch breaks to ensure the project has met a high standard. Being able to put their learning into context has been extremely valuable.”
Some of the children were able to go along to see their garden in its place in the gardening show.
Holly added: “The children really enjoyed themselves being able to explore other gardens made by schools around Scotland. Members of the public were so impressed with their design and especially the hidden spinning feature.”