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Our love of gardening changed our lives – and our communities
The RHS’s Britain in Bloom competition celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. Sharon Smith meets some of the people whose lives it has enriched
When Jill Mace’s husband died, her fellow “Amersham Bloomers” – a group of community gardeners in the Buckinghamshire town where she lives – helped her to cope.
“Doug died in 2019. It was a massive blow; Bloom helped me a lot,” says Jill, 80, referring to Britain In Bloom, an annual gardening competition run by the RHS to find the country’s best turned-out towns, villages and cities. “In 2014, a lady called Barbara Spalding had joined the Bloomers and we became friends,” she continues. “In 2020, her husband died, so we had a great friendship, including during Covid. There are a couple of other Bloomers whose husbands died, and we started going out for lunch and coffee. We’re known as the Bubbly Bloomers because we occasionally enjoy a glass of fizz.”
This year, Britain in Bloom is celebrating its 60th anniversary with the theme of friendship, which is spot-on, says Jill. “Since my husband died, I’ve had the companionship of these friends. We’re all really different from one another, just brought together with one common aim: to make Amersham look lovely.”
The Amersham Bloomers, a core of 25 volunteers, work with the town council and ad-hoc volunteers from local organisations such as schools, youth groups and businesses.
Each year, Steve Catanach, leader of Amersham In Bloom, comes up with new design ideas, then the volunteers get planting, weeding, tidying litter,
‘Amersham is full of flowers, but what’s changed is that we do a lot of environmental planting’
and maintaining what is already there.
“We look after so much more than just flower beds now,” says Jill, who has been an Amersham Bloomer for over 10 years. “In the memorial gardens in Old Amersham, we have a sensory garden, a peace garden and a new coronation clock planted out. Amersham is full of flowers, but what’s changed is that we’ve gone for a lot more environmental planting now. When I first joined it was annuals and formal presentations, whereas now we have wildflower gardens and more perennials.”
Before he died, Doug was also involved: “He was known as the man with the broom because he did all the clearing up for us. He also made bug hotels and things.”
Friendships are forged across all age groups. While half of Bloomers are aged 55 and over, the competition’s more informal arm, It’s Your Neighbourhood, attracts younger participants, 29 per cent of whom are under the age of 16.
Good friends Lynn Smith, 75, and Ella Nobbs, 16, are an example of this. They met through Rawtenstall in Bloom, Lancashire.
“I’d never even heard of Bloom until I saw everyone out there making everywhere look nice. I thought it was such a cool idea,” says Ella. Rossendale Youth Zone, to which she belongs, contacted the Rawtenstall Bloomers to ask if they could volunteer.
Ella had never gardened before. “When I started it I enjoyed it; I thought it was fun to do and interesting to learn about. I liked the planting best,” she says.
The youngsters created a community garden, adding bat boxes which they made from recycled materials, and creating beds of flowers including geraniums, sunflowers, petunias and hydrangeas.
“We invited the Bloomers to open our community garden in December 2022 and then we kept meeting up at the Youth Zone to get help and advice on what plants are best to put in, where to get them, etc,” says Ella.
Using the Rawtenstall Bloomers’ 2023 entry theme of Slippers, Sunflowers and Sparrows – the slippers allude to the town’s past as a shoe manufacturer – the youth group entered the It’s Your Neighbourhood section. They combined their garden with artwork, hanging up old shoes planted with flowers and decorating a yellow car belonging to teenage twins Cairon and Nathan Cokell’s mum Terry with big paper sunflowers. For Ella, meeting new people and gardening have been the highlights: “I helped with the planting, though it was a pain watering all those shoes,” she says.
Ella’s friend Lynn Smith, a keen gardener, joined her Bloom group when she retired.
“I went along and at first did a couple of hours of gardening a week. But very quickly I was dragged in to do other things and now it’s taken my life over. It’s sometimes like doing a full-time job,” she says.
For her, the friendships she has made are invaluable: “Bloom is bigger than just horticulture because it brings the community together,” she says. “Meeting the youth group, which I would never have done without Bloom, has enhanced my life. It’s been a joy. I call in there and there’s an immediate welcome and a desire to show me what they’ve been doing. When I first met Ciaran and Nathan they didn’t even speak. Now they talk and tease me.”
For Ella, the Bloomers’ moral support is important: “They give us the confidence to do well. We’re only young, and they have experience of life, which we haven’t got yet. They give advice and help out and we know they care.”
It’s not just entrants who make new friends. As a national judge for nine years, Andrew Jackson has travelled all over to assess communities’ best horticultural efforts.
Stunning as the displays are, for Jackson, 56, from Ryton, Tyne & Wear, it is the people who count the most.
There are, he says, many social benefits of Bloom: “So many people have said to me over the years that they didn’t know anybody in their village or town apart from their neighbours until they got involved with Bloom, and now they know so many more people.”
He agrees with Lynn on the multigenerational appeal: “In Durham, we had people as young as three-year-olds from the local nursery involved, right up to a lovely man in his 90s.”
What’s more, you don’t have to tend a whole town to make a difference. Dawn Weller, 59, and her pensioner neighbour Lesley Newland, have transformed an alleyway on their estate in Cowley, Oxford.
“We have a cut-through to the local shops that was very neglected, overgrown, full of weeds, and plagued by antisocial behaviour like drug dealing, kids hanging about, and littering,” says Dawn. “It was one of those places you don’t want to go if you can avoid it. Last year, Lesley started putting pots with spring bulbs – daffs, tulips, hyacinths – in the borders to brighten it up, and I joined in.”
The pair continued to tend the alleyway. “We planted dahlias, canna lilies, sunflowers, petunias, lavender; it was very eclectic, we had it all going on in there,” says Dawn. They also commissioned local artist Lisa Curtis to paint a mural on a wall that was blighted by graffiti. “We got everybody involved; we wrote to all the neighbours asking if there was anything they wanted to see in the mural. The consensus was flowers and wildlife: happy things to make you feel good.”
Locals stopped avoiding the alleyway and, as traffic increased, the drug dealers and vandals disappeared.
“A girl aged five who walks through the alleyway every day called it Flower Lane. Now, our local councillor has put in an application to have it officially named that,” says Dawn.
Locals help out, including children who call Dawn and Lesley “the flower ladies”.
“All the kids come along to weed and to help water and it takes forever because they like to water one pot at a time,” says Dawn. “My five-year-old granddaughter loves going down there now with her little watering can. I like meeting people. When I’m working in the alleyway, locals stop and talk about their plants. We have exotics such as the canna lilies, and some people hadn’t seen those sorts of plants before. There was a lot of interest because people saw the whole process of them growing, and when they flowered people came and took photos.”
Community gardening fosters a sense of belonging, says Jill Mace: “I think I’m putting something back into the town. People stop all the time to thank us for what we do. It’s lovely to feel that people enjoy what you’ve done.”
Nor do you have to be an expert gardener to join in, says Lynn Smith. “It’s about being involved and taking pride in where you live. People visit our town from Manchester and Rochdale, just because they think it’s so beautiful. People in our Bloom group have come to live here because they say it looks loved.”
‘This is bigger than just horticulture because it brings people together’