New Garden: Golden Lane Estate, Barbican

 

The Golden Lane Estate is a beautiful Grade II listed building, whose community are struggling to maintain it’s gardens. We’re working with the local Golden Lane Baggers (allotment growers) to re-create a beautiful poppy field in the Bastion Garden and create luscious underplanting for its older trees.

The local gardening group believes, which we love, that all planting should be more than just ornamental – it should be pollinator friendly or drought-tolerant also. It’s an exciting place to get to work.

Golden Lane Estate, Social Housing

Address: Golden Lane, Golden Lane Estate, London EC1Y 0RD
5 minutes’ walk from Barbican Station and 12 minutes’ walk from Farringdon Station.

Capacity: 24 volunteers

We’re looking for Corporate Gardening Volunteers to help with the following at Golden Lane Estate:

Breathing life into the Rotunda Garden

• Removing weeds
• Planting poppies and sedums in the cracks (the structure is Grade II listed so we can’t make structural changes.)
  There were poppies here in 2019 and the residents have asked for help planting more.
• Cutting the lavenders back (nice smelling, mindful job)
• Cutting back the trees side growth

Creating new planters for the Community Centre

• Removing a lot of the soil from the planters
• Filling the planters with healthy soil
• Putting in drought tolerant, pollinator-friendly, and/or fragrant herbs (think sage, rosemary, thyme) which residents can use and enjoy the presence of.
• Filling the areas surrounding the planters with small, spreading sedums to soften the look of the area

 

Underplanting the trees & pocket gardens

• Weeding under the trees
• Planting in drought-tolerant perennials to add some excitement to these barren patches.
• Forking the ground, to break up the soil and improve drainage for the roots of new plants.
• A few small micro-gardens are the site need some new plant material put in and some old material pruned. This is particularly urgent around the playground as more families come to use it as Summer approaches.

Summer Buddy Scheme

• The Golden Lane community is starting a Gardening Buddy Scheme. The goal here is to help residents who are unable to or simply need some additional support in managing their own garden.
• We will be meeting residents and helping them with some of the heavy work.

We are looking for groups of Corporate Volunteer Gardeners who can come and get the work started – clearly a lot of people power required to get the process started!

If you’d like your team to get stuck in at Golden Lane Estate, please email Matt@LeavesBreathe.co.uk.

Lastly, I’d like to thank a member of the Golden Lane Community (who’ll remain nameless but no less sincerely appreciated) and Gavin Orr (Golden Lane’s Estate Manager), pictured below, for welcoming Leaves Breathe and our future volunteers to the Golden Lane estate.

Leaves Breathe is excited to get cracking with the work in the Spring and Summer.