Gardening Club: Churchyard Tree Maintenance

Gardening Club: Feb ‘22

Churchyard Tree Maintenance

20th Feb 2022

This month, our gardening club joined forces with local villagers from Great Wymondley to assist with some much needed maintenance in St. Mary’s Churchyard. Although our main focus is the Wymondley Community Garden, we love to get involved and help with other garden projects throughout the parish when we can.

A tree survey had been carried out at St. Mary’s Church before Christmas which had highlighted that some remedial work needed to be undertaken on the churchyard trees, before 1st March to avoid nesting birds. We were happy to help get some of this work done.

One of our Community Gardeners, Damian, writes:

“Snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils were all evident this morning at a crisp 9am start to our clearance session, which ended with the heavens opening at about 11.45am. But the intervening 3 or so hours saw an amazing community effort, with a great number of people joining to help; at times the group was 15 strong.

Key objectives completed included general maintenance of the churchyard and trees and, inside the church, the rearranging of pews and timber ready for groundworks next weekend.

While a couple of chainsaw wielding farmers cut up a fallen Ash, other volunteers were saving other trees by cutting back the choking Ivy. As one ‘splinter group’ cut back Goat Willow, verges and bramble, another group was kept busy transporting the cuttings to their ‘final resting place’ on the churchyard boarders.

All of this hard work was made easy by the friendly sense of community and shared purpose, coupled with excellent tea, coffee, bacon rolls and cake the effort was made really worthwhile.”