Royal glory grows on charity’s garden
AROCHDALE homelessness charity who exhibited a garden at the prestigious Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Flower Show at Tatton Park have won a Bronze medal award.
Petrus, who provide residential and day support to people at risk of, or experiencing homeless, displayed their garden, Full Circle, at the show last weekend.
It was sponsored by the Rotary Club Rochdale.
The garden was inspired by the flooding Rochdale has experienced in recent years, and features a green roof on a seating gazebo that not only attracts wildlife but helps slow rainfall down.
It also has a repeated planting of bamboos along the back wall and dark-leaved Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ at the front to “give interest and texture to the space.”
The garden also features a rain garden system that collects water from a living roof and channels it into a large pond at the bottom of the garden. The plants included can cope in gardens that experience flooding.
A spokesman for Petrus said: “We’re absolutely overjoyed to announce that our service users and volunteers’ garden Full Circle is a Bronze Medal Winner at RHS - Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show Tatton Park! “Their garden is twice the size of ours at the 2019 event and we’ve faced 10 times the challenges, so we couldn’t be prouder of them.
“They’ve just done an incredible job.” Petrus has been affected by the flooding in Rochdale, as their community allotment, PIER, has often been impacted.
The service users codesigned the garden to highlight the impact of flooding and reflect the need to go back to nature to find solutions, through demonstrating what gardeners and the community can do to work with water and increase flood resilience.
The industrial and farming heritage of Rochdale where water was crucial to the town’s survival has been a key inspiration.
Many of Petrus’ service users and volunteers have multiple and complex needs or have experienced homelessness and engage with the charity’s community allotment Petrus Incredible Edibles Rochdale (PIER), which supports individuals out of negative routines through improved social, mental and physical wellbeing.
With their garden, they hope to break negative stereotypes associated with homelessness, mental health and learning disabilities.