Green Flag Award for Cwm Harry Community Garden

Cwm Harry community garden wins a Green Flag award.

The Cwm Harry community garden is thrilled to receive a Green Flag award in recognition of its achievements in developing a bio-diverse, organic community garden on what was once a truck park behind a light industrial unit on the Newtown’s Vastre estate. Blackbirds and frogs, dragon-flies and voles are now thriving in between the raised beds, ponds, allotment plots and teaching beds in the community garden where previously there was nothing.

The Green Flag Award® scheme is a national standard for parks and green spaces in the UK. It was first launched in 1996 to recognise and reward the best green spaces in the country. and, many years later, it continues to provide the benchmark against which our parks and green spaces are measured. It is also seen as a way of encouraging others to achieve high environmental standards, setting a benchmark of excellence in recreational green areas.

Cwm Harry has brought together its concerns for healthy community and healthy environment in its work on waste reduction, food waste composting, local food promotion and community engagement. It is a constantly shifting picture with new opportunities arising with others receding. Recent changes in County-wide waste management strategies has challenged the organisation to come with new areas of enterprise, and the award winning community garden is also having to find a new base for itself, which it is doing by forming a partnership with Coleg Powys and by moving onto the 6th form college’s Newtown campus.

Project member Emma Maxwell was at the Royal Welsh showground to collect the award today and commented that anything that underlines the importance and relevance of community growing is most welcome. There is a host of community groups out there with an increasing interest in Getting Growing and our new project has the specific aim of meeting that challenge.

Hi Res photo available at http://www.get-growing.org.uk/press/cwmharrypic.jpg (5.5 mb)

Photo by Steven Jones, of Emma Maxwell, Get-Growing horticulture consultant with Matt Swarbrick, Permaculture Design student and BBC Wildlife cameraman in the award winning community garden on the Vastre Estate, Newtown, Powys..

Full permission is allowed  to use this image in its intended context of promoting community growing.

By Steven Jones