Pam and Kelvin are volunteer gardeners at the hospice Inpatient Unit, taking care of the entire hospice grounds for the benefit of patients, family, and staff. The couple, who are married, share how they got involved in gardening at the hospice.
Pam: I took early retirement in 2015 without a clear plan of what I wanted to do. I did a basic garden maintenance course at Capel Manor, followed by a professional garden maintenance course the year after. Then I decided I wanted to volunteer, so I looked around for things to do with gardening. A friend of mine volunteered for the hospice and told me that they had a garden here.
I started volunteering in July 2017, and Kelvin joined in April 2018. He started off just doing the power-washing and the hedge trimming, and then started to get involved with the rest of it. We’re the only garden volunteers at the Finchley site currently.
Kelvin: Part of the back was quite a jungle, and probably hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, so I started to get involved in clearing that, which led to other tasks.
Pam: We come in once a week, usually finishing around 3:30 PM. If it rains, we finish earlier; if there’s more to do, we stay longer. We start at the end of February and finish around the end of November, and we’re mostly just sweeping leaves by then.
Kelvin: There’s only so many leaves you can sweep!
Pam: We are keeping things ticking over at the moment but do have busy times at the beginning and end of our nine month season (late February – late November).
Kelvin: We make a few additions and changes here and there – like the trough outside the main entrance, which we planted with flowers in the ROYGBIV colour scheme to celebrate Pride month.
Pam: We have an account with Finchley Nurseries as well as Clockhouse in Forty Hall where we get the plants from. We have also received donations of plants as part of the Buzz Stop project (N3 & N12 Finchley Pollinators), and other donations from friends as well as ones we propagate ourselves. In addition we also try to find a home for plants belonging to patients. Plus, the hospice has a wish-list, so people can buy things for the hospice from that list. We decided we wanted to go green with a battery-operated hedge trimmer and lawnmower. They went on the wish-list, and about a week later, fundraising told me that someone had bought it!
Kelvin: Getting that hedge trimmer was also motivated by the noise – the gardens are right by the patient’s rooms, so a regular hedge trimmer is really noisy.
Pam: The patients and their families like to sit in the gardens, and sometimes we’ll take them on a tour of the gardens to show them what’s growing.
Kelvin: Some people retire and get themselves an allotment – we have a whole hospice garden!
