Peace at Last at Stilton School

Last week I had the opportunity to visit our church school at Stilton. The occasion was the formal dedication of some extension work and a Peace Garden (left), complete with artwork by the children, chimes, incense and planting.

I was shown round the school by two of the older children who were perfect hosts, and then took part in

an assembly and ribbon-cutting, with the headteacher Annette Baughan and local vicar Richard Longfoot.

You can see some lovely pictures of the event on the school website. This one shows me with some members of the School Council just as the ribbon was being cut.

It’s a lovely school and does indeed have a very peaceful atmosphere – a peace that I believe starts in our hearts with the love of God, spreads to those near us in our schools and churches, and then enables us together to spread it the world. “Peace is flowing like a river, flowing out through you and me” and “Make me a channel of your peace” were obviously the right songs to sing!

Filed under: Events, Gardening, Schools, Diocese of Ely

Growing to Give

Head gardeners at Milton CE School were delighted to achieve the special ‘site manager’s award’ at the budding gardeners’ competition at RHS Hyde Hall in Essex. The children took plants they had grown and built a wonderful garden on the theme of ‘Growing to Give’. Back

at school the children are helping to pilot the ‘foodshare’ project and have dedicated one bed in their allotment to producing food to donate to the local children’s hospice. More information about the project can be found on the website – http://foodshare.co.uk.

 

Filed under: Church of England, Gardening, Schools

Gardening with God: the Cambridge Mott Sermon 2010

In 1762 Alderman William Mott gave £5 p.a. to endow an annual sermon at Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge. A memorial tablet in the church records that 10/6 should go to the preacher, 5/- to be divided between the minister, wardens and overseers for their trouble, and the rest to go to the poor. The money (I am told) has long since gone (though the poor, the vicar says, are still with them), but the tradition continues as part of the Mayoral Civic Sunday, and this year it is my privilege to deliver the sermon, on a theme close to my heart.                                              (photo © Cambridge 2000)

Thankyou very much for the privilege of preaching for you on this special and historic occasion. Our local civic government is seriously important to us, and we are grateful to those who serve in it, and keep them regularly in our prayers as Scripture says we should. Those prayers today are particularly with our new Mayor Cllr Sheila Stuart in what will be a demanding but exhilarating year, and in her honour I have dug out my own proper episcopal dress, which is still mercifully, I fear, a little cooler than mayoral fur.

Most of the time, of course, both the mayor and I will be dressed as you are, whether that is for undertaking our duties, or digging the garden. I don’t know whether Alderman Mott whose sermon I’m delighted to be preaching today (and whose 10/6 I would once have had) was a gardener, but Jean and I are totally Titchmarshed out after maxing all last week on the Chelsea Flower Show. We’re not born gardeners, but have twice been given large gardens to take on. The first was at a Cumbrian country rectory. It was a damp, sheltered spot and everything green grew like crazy. I used to dream of pruning. Now we have a lovely mature garden in Ely, where we can grow a wonderful variety of flowers and veg and we took ourselves off to the Beth Chatto gardens (pictured) a few days ago and came home well laden with new ones. Her motto is very much getting the right plants in the right places so they just romp away perfectly naturally. It’s a lovely image of how I think God wants it to be for each of us – growing splendidly, each in our own way, because we’re planted as we should be.

The idea of God as a gardener is of course built into the very structure of the Bible. It’s there at the beginning with the Garden of Eden. It’s there at the end in the image of the new Jerusalem. On the wall of the temple in the old Jerusalem, was a great garden vine because that was one of Israel’s main pictures of itself – as God’s vine in God’s vineyard. Jesus picks up the picture in several of his parables, and it was probably in front of the great golden vine that he gave the teaching we’ve just heard today, en route through the temple precincts – not unpoignantly – to another garden, that of Gethsemane.

Filed under: Gardening, Sermons and Talks

At Beth Chatto’s Gardens

A photographer’s paradise! We went to visit Beth Chatto’s gardens near Colchester, in search of ideas for the dry part of our garden. (Our area is classed as semi-arid by geographers!) The planting was superb and we came back full of ideas, but were impressed as well by the peaceful and caring atmosphere – good teas, good staff, good loos, fair prices. And – the best of weather plus the best of plants meant that I could hardly put my camera down. I’ll post a full album on Flickr soon, but here are ten of the best for starters.

Filed under: Gardening, Travel

Peat Free

We’ve just watched Toby Buckland’s Gardener’s World Special on Peat-Free Compost. What  a great programme! No drama, fair presentation, practical, loads of facts simply put, and it didn’t keep on repeating itself but actually built up an argument. Conclusion: we’ll be reading the labels and cutting out the peat wherever we can. For some reason the BBC doesn’t seem to let us look at the programme on-line, but this is the page in case they change their mind. And here’s a quote from Toby Buckland when he was interviewed on taking on the GW job:

The Government has set targets of being 90 per cent peat-free by 2010, so gardening in a peat-free world is something that we will all have to learn. I will be showing viewers how to use alternatives: coir, wood fibre and green compost. All behave differently to peat but can, if you have the know-how, outperform peat. That said, even the gardeners at Kew, who have been peat-free for years, say some plants need a little peat in their potting mixes – citrus trees, for example. So if we talk about growing lemons, we’ll recommend peat as one of the ingredients. We won’t ignore the issue – we’ll be honest to help viewers.

Filed under: Environment, Gardening, Media Matters, Gardeners' World, Peat free