10 years of the Corner House garden

Wansteadium reader and Wanstead stalwart Marian Temple writes:

I can’t believe it! Was it really 10 years ago that a group of us got fed up with that sad piece of soil, the front garden of the Corner House Age Concern Luncheon Club. Full of weeds and take away rubbish, right on the High Street. Yeuk! We discussed it at the Wanstead Society and agreed to have a go, treating it as an honorary High Street flower bed. The council were fine with this.

So Wanstead has enjoyed 10 years of a wonderful cottage garden that delights and surprises every year. Being a very old fashioned garden with plants that come up every year and seed themselves, it tends to do its own thing with a bit of constant gentle tweaking. So, surprise plants appear or they come up in an unexpected place. From week to week the garden changes and every year, it’s different.

To celebrate 10 years of this delight, at the end of May, the Wanstead Society celebrated at the Corner House; coffee, tea and the most fabulous cake thanks to Belgique. We invited all those people who over the years have helped us in the garden. Society members and of course passers-by trundled in to enjoy the cake and the display of photos from the beginning in 2003 to now. What a journey! People were also surprised to see there is a cottage garden at the back of the house.

We’ve been working on this for a couple of years. It doesn’t take long for these plants to do their stuff. Little did we imagine ten years ago when we started hauling out all the bits of rubbish and digging in compost from our own garden heaps, that ten years down the line we’d still be at it. Every moment of working on this not so sad patch of soil now, has been thoroughly enjoyed and the passers by love it. Hard to imagine Wanstead without it. Here’s to the next ten years!

If you’d like to help with this garden and other patchwork pieces we look after, please ring Mat on 0782 180 8692. No experience necessary and a good way to learn about this old fashioned kind of gardening. Sometimes we just need a bit of strength. Is there anybody out there who would be good on a ladder putting up trellis for a going to be rampant rose??? We’d love to hear from you.