'It's an honour to help maintain the baby memorial garden'
Last year, we made a commitment to take on the maintenance of the Stephen’s Footprints baby memorial garden, which is located within Melton Country Park.
Since then, volunteers have spent many hours weeding, pruning, cleaning the railings and painting the bench.
It is a lovely, peaceful area, and an honour to be able to give our time to such a special project in the park.
Within the last couple of weeks, we have started work on the three central beds, which have been colour-themed to a new design, so that there is one in pink, one white and the other in blue.
Firstly, we needed to clear the beds of existing plants, especially where stronger-growing items had taken over; reusing some within the same area, and relocating others into the side borders.
More topsoil was added, together with manure, and some bags of donated compost as well.
We sourced most of the plants from Miles Nurseries, in Hoby, and luckily for us, we had some well-timed heavy rain, which meant we could go ahead with planting.
Still to come will be a handful of more specialised plants, together with lovely oriental hyacinths and grape hyacinths in all three colours.
Unfortunately, we have had to exclude other popular spring-flowering bulbs, as they are likely to be eaten by squirrels, mice, or other rodents.
Our lovely plants include cranesbill geraniums, penstemons, pulmonarias, salvias, Siberian irises, Japanese anemones, Ceratostigmas, a dwarf escallonia, euonymus, hyssop and ornamental grasses.
These, together with the bulbs, will provide lovely colour and interest from spring, right through to autumn, with some winter structure as well.
Once everything is in, we will mulch with bark chips, very kindly supplied by Melton Borough Council.
Our other main ongoing project this autumn is of course the Dry Bed.
A design has been drawn up, which features a mix of roses, shrubs and various perennials, and last week we needed to start re-weeding the whole bed, as lots of new weed seedlings had sprung up after the rain.
Once they have been cleared, we will be ready to start the new planting.