Creative Partnerships – Art and gardens

Managed by the National Trust, Gibside in Newcastle-upon-Tyne is one of the North of England?s finest landscapes, a forest garden currently under restoration. The former home of the late Queen Mother?s family, the estate embraces miles of walks through woodland and beside the River Derwent. As part of an initiative to form links with a school at each of their sites to enable children to visit historic gardens and places in the North East, the National Trust offered Grindon Broadway Junior School in Sunderland an allotment space within a walled garden at Gibside, with the support of Creative Partnerships and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The allotment allowed Year 3 pupils (aged 7) the opportunity to learn about managing an allotment and how to grow and cultivate crops, with a view to using them in the classroom in cookery lessons. It has provided the children with an invaluable insight into the world outside their usual experiences, providing them with skills that could be transferred back to their school garden.

Grindon Broadway Junior School?s allotment is an ongoing programme and the school will be sharing with parents their knowledge of growing crops and will be teaching pupils how the crops can be used in a variety of meals. The allotment project was developed as part of a larger programme that saw the development of a sculpture garden, which was inspired by a selection of designs by the pupils. Two artists, Cath Campbell and Bernadette O?Toole helped the pupils to draw inspiration from artwork they had seen at Baltic, the international centre for contemporary art, to create works for the garden.

Dig for Victory is a Creative Partnerships project based in Slough, Berkshire. It involves children in Year 5 (aged 9 years) at two primary schools, Godolphin Junior School and Priory School (pictured), where it links into a history project about the Second World War. The children dug vegetable plots, planted seeds, watered, fed and harvested them and finally used their crops to make food. The range of vegetables, fruits and herbs they produced included carrots, chillies, green beans, sage, marrows, parsley, peppers, potatoes, radishes, rosemary, strawberries, tomatoes. After their first highly productive year, the children produced another bumper harvest this year.