Combining wildlife and wellbeing, a community garden in Canterbury is helping volunteers and members of the public connect with nature while promoting positive mental health.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Even though it's quiet here at the Canterbury campus out of term time,
00:03 tucked away in one corner of the university, one volunteer group are bearing the August heat.
00:09 Kent Community Garden, or Kent COG, is led by Emily Mason
00:13 and is a joint effort between the university and mental health charity East Kent Mind.
00:18 I think particularly what I've noticed for our students, so young people between 18 to 25,
00:23 the pressure on them to be on and just on it all the time,
00:28 watching the students that access this space really put their phones down, switch off,
00:35 slow down and have to wait for something to grow, because it takes a long time to grow certain things.
00:41 There's a little bit of magic to that I think.
00:43 The garden was formed in an effort to aid student isolation,
00:47 but has grown into a much larger project.
00:49 It sees student, staff and other community members working together,
00:53 and both literally and metaphorically, it's starting to bear fruit.
00:58 Engaging with nature has been shown to have extremely positive effects on people's mental health,
01:03 and while it's no cure-all, going green gives people a safe community.
01:07 Some, according to the organisers, are not even particularly green-fingered.
01:12 So we started off very much as a gardening project here,
01:14 and then we sort of realised that lots of the volunteers,
01:17 especially the students who come down here,
01:19 they want to get involved in other things and not necessarily gardening.
01:22 So we're expanding what we do to kind of think about houseplants
01:26 and to do things like bee walks and butterfly counts,
01:30 and doing kind of projects that engage with nature in lots of ways,
01:34 so that, you know, we've done soup making, we've done crafting with nature.
01:40 So we're trying to expand all the time to use the site as an opportunity for people
01:44 just to enjoy nature, to be in the space,
01:47 and to kind of reap those benefits of being in a green space.
01:51 Not only is the garden great for its caretakers' mental health,
01:55 it's good for the health of the university,
01:57 with fresh produce being sold back to on-campus restaurants,
02:01 a pollination garden for the bees,
02:03 and the garden also provides a good place for extremely different people to mix,
02:07 all the way from 18 to 80.
02:09 Well, this garden has been running for a long time,
02:12 but really started to grow after the pandemic, when many were at their lowest.
02:15 One thing's for sure, getting back to your roots has never felt better.
02:20 Finn McDermid for KMTV.