Author: By Paul Bignell and Susie Mesure
The Independent on Sunday wants hundreds of thousands more children to
share Isabelle’s taste of the good life, which is why today we are
relaunching our hugely successful campaign to Let Children Grow. Working
with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), we want to help all primary
schools in the UK to provide some form of practical gardening for pupils.
More than 11,000 schools have signed up to the campaign, which we launched
last year, but, like the prestigious gardening charity behind the Chelsea
Flower Show, we don’t want to stop there. The RHS, which has its own
Campaign for School Gardening, aims to get 80 per cent of British primary
schools, about 17,000, growing fruit and vegetables by 2012.
Many of Britain’s greenest fingered luminaries are backing our crusade,
including David Bellamy and the BBC’s Chris Beardshaw. Bellamy, who got into
growing vegetables while “digging for victory” during the Blitz,
said: “Every school that joins is teaching its pupils natural history,
and that is very exciting stuff. We need kids to get involved so that
there’ll be another Bill Oddie or David Attenborough on the way.”
Beardshaw added: “Children are not just interested in growing ? they
have a much broader enthusiasm to look at plants on a microscopic level and
to relate plants to specific organisms and are interested in the subject of
biodiversity.”
Experts believe introducing children to gardening helps them to understand
where food comes from. RHS research suggests it can help academic
achievement, behaviour and confidence among pupils while boosting their
health.
Gordon Seabright, the RHS’s acting director general, said: “Gardening in
schools not only teaches children about growing plants and caring for the
environment, but it also helps them to learn the skills of communication,
team work and patience. Working with The Independent on Sunday means we can
encourage even more schools, teachers and parents to help their children to
grow into happier and healthier individuals.”
Isabelle, who turns four next month, is lucky because her Montessori nursery
regularly gets its pupils sowing seeds. “She just came home with a baby
Jurassic Park complete with mini plastic dinosaur planted with cress and
rosemary,” said her father, Ed Lewis. “It all reinforces where her
food comes from. We hope that she’ll help her mum cook the carrots when they
come up.” Isabelle will be in charge of planting next year’s crop when
her father, a major in the British Army, returns to Afghanistan.
Interest from schools has soared since the RHS campaign began. Charlotte
Green, who runs the Gardening with Children website on behalf of the Recycle
Works, which sells gardening equipment, said: “We’ve seen a 100-fold
increase in the number of schools we sell to compared with two years ago.”
At Kingsway Primary School in Goole, East Yorkshire, which The IoS adopted as
our beacon Let Children Grow school, the number of pupils gardening has
doubled. Liam Jackson, the head teacher, said: “We’ve expanded our
after-school gardening club. We’re involving the garden in the curriculum:
the children are writing and drawing about what they see.”
Win! An iPod Touch
To celebrate our Let Children Grow campaign, The IoS has teamed up with
the Royal Horticultural Society to offer readers the chance to win an iPod
Touch, which comes with the charity’s new gardening app. The only
stipulation is that your child’s school backs our crusade.
Click here http://apps.rhs.org.uk/SCHOOLGARDENING/teachershome/register.aspa
to visit the RHS website where you can register.
To enter the competition, get your child to send us a poem about why they love
gardening. Entries to IoS Gardening Competition, 2 Derry Street,
London, W8 5HF or sundayletters@independent.co.uk,
with ‘gardening competition’ in the subject header, to reach us by 20 June.
Usual terms and conditions apply.
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