Marians Marvelous Marauders

For those who don't know Marian, she is the driving force behind the Wanstead Community Gardeners, a team of locals taking pride into caring for neglected pieces of land in the Wanstead area. Walking down Wanstead High Street, you cannot miss the different patches of land now showing a variety of lovely plants & flowers, decorating the landscape and cheering up the locals coming past.

Her latest protect has finally gotten the go-ahead, the car park at Snaresbrook station. A strip of neglected land along the edge of the car park has been handed over for a make-over. Today the focus was to clear rubbish, sift out rocks, spread soil & manure and in short get the stretch ready for planting.

As before, Marian put out the word that the project was on and the Goodgym crew was more than happy to get stuck in, delivering the usual level of energy and smiles, as well as welcoming the lovely Jenny on her first visit to this corner of London. Cedric popped in as well, having heard rumours about another project, as always a pleasure catching up.

Thanks to all joining in, we'll be keeping an eye on this to see how it develops and no doubt there will be more GG involvement!

Report/Feedback received by Marian:

"It was such a pleasure as always to have the Goodgymmers with us today. Very appropriate because they were there at the beginning of this project Nov 19th on a Monday evening, a group came along headtorches at the ready and took down a load of ivy from the wall. The bed we have adopted is long and narrow and was swamped by thick ivy growing wide from the wall. All that stuff was put in jumbo bags and they finished the job today by jumping up and down on it to compress it down so that the three bags could be put in the vehicle and away to the dump. Apart from that, more ivy roots dug up, rubbish taken out, another layer of leaf mould and top soil added, raked smooth and footed down. We've decided to have one more load of top soil added but that will be done from the garden centre vehicle so not a problem for us. Very soon, it will be time to plant this new border all 35 metres of it. (As usual, we've bitten off more than we can chew but usually manage to chew it.)

This is going to look so amazing. We're all so excited about it. We've already been given a wisteria and a rampaging climbing rose. Both needing new homes. Thank you from us to the GGs that helped us today. Your group really does make our projects possible. It's more than marvellous.

All good wishes, Marian. "