Sustainable & Spiritual Garden.
Sustainable & Spiritual Garden Space at St Mary of the Angels School
We have a very exciting garden popping up in the school’s front garden over the next few months. With some extensive planning, Miss Casey Lennon and Mrs Tiffany Ahumada, together with the ideas from the Year 5/6 Class of 2022, have commenced preparation of the new garden space to incorporate a sustainable and spiritual memorial garden for students and our whole school community to enjoy.
With works already kicking off in the front garden space, we apologise in advance for some chaos and untidiness that might start developing in this area, and with your support, we endeavour to have the garden well underway in due course.
Our new garden space will aim to create a sustainable garden that fosters spirituality and develops the senses. The children are involved in planning, making and sustaining the garden space. The expected (environmental and educational) outcomes of the project include learning about plants and food production, composting and water management. This project would not have been possible without our successful applications for two grants to invest in our dream. We received grants from the Woolworths Junior Landcare Grant and Costa Group Community Grant. Our school’s project information can be accessed at https://woolworthsgrantsmap.juniorlandcare.org.au/grant-round-5/sustainable-and-spiritual-garden-space/ and our school features on the interactive Woolworths Junior Landcare Grants Map https://woolworthsgrantsmap.juniorlandcare.org.au/ .
We will endeavour to achieve as much in this garden space with our allocated funds but do anticipate that we may not get all of our ideas into the finished project for 2023 and will need to look further as to how we can continually add to the space each year to make it be the best space for our school.
In the new garden, we are planning to re-landscape the current garden beds at the entrance to the school and around our iconic statue of Mary. We will install 3 raised garden beds (one for each of the school houses - MacAuley, McKillop & Mercy) for students to grow fruit and veggies in and to learn more about food production and plant new plants suitable to our climate and conditions to improve the appearance of our front garden.
Within the garden, we will also incorporate a memorial garden with hopes to plant a rose for the treasured loved ones whom we have lost in our school community into this special space. A coloured rose significant to each of the loved ones will be specifically chosen and planted into our memorial garden involving as many of our families in the planting process of these roses to ensure we always remember their cherished and much loved family members.
One of our original aims designed by our students in Year 5/6 2022 was to create a stepping stone rosary bead set which will weave around our statue of Mary. To achieve this our current students have created a mosaic to be placed in the garden as part of the rosary set. I thank Karen Faint, our talented Educational Assistant for her help in running mosaicing workshops with all year levels.
Our students teamed up with a partner to create a beautiful mosaic masterpiece and we couldn’t be happier with our finished products. On completion of the mosaics, students mapped out where our rosary stepping stones will now feature. Thanks to all of the students for their incredibly beautiful designs, each one will look spectacular in our garden and a special relic to remain in our school grounds for many, many years to come.
Our students are certainly very excited about the new garden space and more importantly that it is a space made and maintained by themselves. If you would like to know more about the garden or would like to help out in any way, please share your information with the front office.
By Mrs Tiffany Ahumada
