Paradise Garden Project: Pergola in Progress!
Those of you who came along to our May 2026 Flourish Fest community event might have noticed that some exciting developments are taking place in our Wild Garden - the Paradise Garden Project is well underway!
The project aims to transform the final undeveloped area of our Wild Garden into a vibrant outdoor educational space and a climate aware drought-resistant gravel garden, for the use of our own SEN young-Londoner students and the wider community.
This project has been made possible thanks to a generous grant from the Community Lottery.
We have a real need for more educational space as all of our programmes are oversubscribed.
Alongside our own students, the site and garden also support groups of SEN school pupils via our Branching Out Programme, refugees attending an NHS Horticultural Therapy group, local primary schools and nurseries as well as a Family Volunteering Club.
These developments will help us to increase our capacity on our existing programmes, and allow us to reintroduce nature sessions with local community groups and children, a much-requested programme.
The area has been developed by over 200 corporate and civil servant volunteers, who alongside our staff, students and builders have been working hard to landscape the area from an abandoned spot into a beautiful place for learning.
As part of our community open days, local residents will also help to plant the garden, learning practical green skills and the importance of biodiversity.
The Paradise Garden is a continuation of our inspiring story of transformation - when the charity began in 1982, the site was a derelict and polluted World War 2 brownfield site with only a single shrub. Despite this, our Director Linda envisaged it as a beautiful garden for all.
Over 45 years, this vision has been realised and it has been transformed by staff, SEN students and local people into a beautiful UNESCO award-winning thriving biodiverse site.
At the heart of these new developments is an Oak Pergola, which will serve as an outdoor learning space for our existing programmes as well as a new nature sessions programme for community groups. Once fully established, our students will help with the planting and maintaining of the garden as part of their learning.
The garden is divided into different areas by gabions walls, which are filled with recycled materials like rubble dug up from the garden, broken paving slaps, and donated materials from individual corporate volunteers and organisations including the Temple Garden. By layering the materials in rows, we’ve made decorative walls which can be planted into like a dry stone wall - providing new habitat for wildlife.
Beyond the gabion walls, once the pergola area is completed, we plan to create an exciting new sensory gravel garden filled with drought-tolerant plants, adapted to our evolving climate.
We are excited to welcome you back in October for our Roots goes Wild community event to show you the progress!