A Dundee parent has been left feeling “overwhelmed” with support after leading the transformation of a community garden.
Helena Woodcock, a parent at Blackness Primary, spent every spare moment for around a month on the “feelgood” project near the primary school.
Private gardener Helena said she approached the school to fix the garden after social distancing meant many people had been using the area as space to queue up.
She said: “The garden was maintained and managed by some of the residents in the nearby sheltered housing.
“But then came Covid and people just were struggling for places to line up. So the garden ended up as a lining up space and every one trod everything to the ground.
“It started to become a really horrible looking space. But it was a beautiful space that made me think, gardening has always been allowed during Covid times, and I love it so thought maybe we could do something with it.
“I asked Councillor Fraser MacPherson to find out who it belonged to and it turned out to belong to the school.
“So I asked the parent council if I could work on it and they said yes. And in four weeks time from the yes we’ve managed to pull through a pretty amazing garden.”
Working on the community garden
Helena took on the majority of the work by herself to prep the space and arrange plants.
She said: “I did a lot of preparation work – for the past three or four weeks I have been going there every free moment.
“I’d probably spent in total around 15 hours just prepping the site – cleaning it up, picking up litter, digging things out.
“And then on the day it took around six hours between eight people to do the garden.
“Just short of 200 plants have gone in there and we put planters and trellises up. The council was great as they gave us compost and the Dundee Botanic Garden people delivered it.
“The Strathmartine Hospital Project gave us over 100 plants and the rest were donations from friends and neighbours. I also work at Glamis Castle as a volunteer and they gave us gravel.
“So for me, it was four weeks of pulling this all together. Then on Saturday everyone came out and helped me to finish it all.
“People have been absolutely wonderful and worked so tirelessly.
“It was absolutely uplifting to have such a nice project where everyone could involve themselves in such good spirits and enthusiasm. It was really great.”
She added: “I’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of people and everyone has welcomed such a feelgood project.”