The Phoenix Garden Blooms

Hello and greetings to all our funders, We wanted to give you all a big update on our progress with our landscaping work that we so very successfully crowdfunded for last August – and which you all contributed towards. Winter is usually a fairly predictable and relatively quiet time for us at the Phoenix Garden. On any normal year, with visitor numbers low, our community gardener busies himself with the many small tasks necessary to get us to Spring looking fresh and inviting to people emerging blinking from hibernation over the dark winter. However it has been a different story this year with all the work we are doing on the landscaping to get us to the point where we can reopen the garden after nearly 18 months of closure for works. Anyone following us on social media will have seen the changes underway. Once our building construction completed in October, we were then able to shift focus towards the landscaping work that would not only connect it with the rest of the garden, but also give it a setting worthy of its unique and beautiful design. While we were doing the work we were somewhat aware of the task ahead of us, but in looking at the winter as a whole we realised that our gardener and volunteers made some truly herculean efforts getting us to Spring with so much progress made. In total our community gardener and volunteers were responsible for : 8tons rubble dug out + put through crusher 20tons topsoil spread 12tons green-waste compost spread + dug in 2tons manure dug in 4tons sand laid as path base 1ton grit laid as drainage under path 10tons crushed rubble dug in or used as mulch and 1ton of paving slabs carried about to make walls The scale of the project also enabled us to grow our volunteer program, as there was no shortage of work on any of our volunteer days, as the above list shows. We held a very well received corporate workday with local business Ingenious Media. Following on from all of this work preparing the ground around the garden for planting and landscaping, the final work of creating new beds and laying paths is now underway. Compared to the high volume, slow going work over Winter, we anticipate that this final phase of work will now be relatively quick, helped by the warmer weather and longer days, with a late Spring opening looking increasingly likely. Thanks once again to everyone for your support and patience, and we look forward to updating you with further progress, and with an opening date in late Spring. All the best from The Phoenix Garden Blooms.

With the path in a good place, our workday of a couple of weeks ago started digging and clearing the area around the path for soil improvement work and eventual replanting...

Now comes a layer of sand over the crushed brick...

The garden building viewed from the top of the path...

And here is the completed layer of rubble showing the layout of the paths...

We'll be posting some progress photos of the landscaping work that you all helped to fund. Here we see the beginnings of the path foundation, made from crushed brick and rubble reclaimed from the garden.

We'll be posting some progress photos of the landscaping work that you all helped to fund. Here we are at the point where we start pulling out the larger rocks and brick pieces from among the large amount of building waste dumped on this ground before it became a garden...