The second part of the garden to be developed was the productive gardening space for those who wanted the chance to 'get their hands dirty'. We call this space Sarah's Garden in memory of Sarah Douglas, who was General Manager of the Students' Union at the IOE when we first began to plan the garden. Sarah was very enthusiastic about the project, immediately seeing its potential to bring together staff, students and alumni to create something that everyone could benefit from. Sadly, Sarah passed away before the garden was complete, but she is remembered with great warmth and affection, and we hope that the garden will embody the sense of community that she was so adept at creating.
In this space we built seven large, shallow planters where we can grow a mix of seasonal crops in order to provide several opportunities each year for the gardeners to try out new ideas. In keeping with our interest in encouraging biodiversity we have a strong focus on native flowering plants, but there is also room for things that people just want to try growing - or eating, or picking!
In the centre of three of the planters we have placed a small pond to attract insects. These are proving incredibly effective and we've had many new insects visiting the garden since we filled them, including some amazing dragon flies. Unfortunately they never stay still long enough for us to photograph them. The recent arrival of bats in the garden owes much to the ponds since they have a cloud of insects above them each evening - the bats just have to fly over the three ponds to get a starter, main and pudding! Our most unexpected visitor to the garden so far is probably a toad. Our ponds were not really designed to be toad or frog friendly (partly because we didn't expect to get any on a concrete roof terrace!) and we think this one probably arrived with one of our soil deliveries.
Along the western wall of the garden we have four deep planters like the ones in the Green Garden, again containing native trees and shrubs. The main reason for including an additional run of hedging here was to provide a second 'resting point' for insects and birds visiting the garden, but an unforeseen spin-off is that the fledgling hedges show passers by that something is happening on the roof. During the recent London Open Gardens weekend we had a number of visitors who were following a route that took in Russell, Woburn and Gordon Squares and were pleased to find an additional garden on the way.
In this space we built seven large, shallow planters where we can grow a mix of seasonal crops in order to provide several opportunities each year for the gardeners to try out new ideas. In keeping with our interest in encouraging biodiversity we have a strong focus on native flowering plants, but there is also room for things that people just want to try growing - or eating, or picking!
In the centre of three of the planters we have placed a small pond to attract insects. These are proving incredibly effective and we've had many new insects visiting the garden since we filled them, including some amazing dragon flies. Unfortunately they never stay still long enough for us to photograph them. The recent arrival of bats in the garden owes much to the ponds since they have a cloud of insects above them each evening - the bats just have to fly over the three ponds to get a starter, main and pudding! Our most unexpected visitor to the garden so far is probably a toad. Our ponds were not really designed to be toad or frog friendly (partly because we didn't expect to get any on a concrete roof terrace!) and we think this one probably arrived with one of our soil deliveries.
Along the western wall of the garden we have four deep planters like the ones in the Green Garden, again containing native trees and shrubs. The main reason for including an additional run of hedging here was to provide a second 'resting point' for insects and birds visiting the garden, but an unforeseen spin-off is that the fledgling hedges show passers by that something is happening on the roof. During the recent London Open Gardens weekend we had a number of visitors who were following a route that took in Russell, Woburn and Gordon Squares and were pleased to find an additional garden on the way.