Royal treeson 👑🌳

15 minutes before Fulham Palace parkrun, a gang of GoodGym red t-shirts began to assemble for this week’s group run. As 9am crept closer, we had formed quite the crowd, and had even adopted a few GoodGym'ers who weren’t donning red that happened to stumble upon us as they arrived. The group run for this week was much larger than usual, as we were in the company of 357 runners who had foregone a Saturday lie-in in favour of a 5k. It was lovely to see so many familiar faces amongst the crowd as we all pushed on with our runs. Conditions were rather muggy this morning, and many of us were the same colour as our tops when we crossed the finish line 🍅 – especially those who were sweating out a tipple from the night before 🍻!! Excellent work everyone 👏.

After a quick (sweaty) group photo taken by the lovely Eddie, who had joined us ready for the task, we waved goodbye to Ben and Alice, and welcomed Cookie on the way over to Fulham Palace House. There we met senior gardener, Pete from the Fulham Palace Trust, who explained that he needed our help weeding around two of the larger trees on the edge of the lawn facing the back of Fulham Palace House. We popped by the shed to pick up the tools and the good old kneeling pads (which we have grown rather fond of, both for kneeling and sitting on!) before Pete walked us over to the first tree. As he headed off to greet his other regular volunteers, Beth led a quick stretching session to ease off the post-parkrun stiffness before we set to work.

Within 45 minutes we had worked together to clear the circle underneath the first tree. Many of us were plucking away at smaller weeds by hand, whilst others used forks to dig up the larger ones. Cookie was following us around the circle with a rake to tidy up in our wake – he joked that he was raking a QR code into the soil that would take any onlookers to the GoodGym website. Unfortunately this would only be readable from the sky due to the size of the patch…a problem which was pointed out just as a plane flew overhead. Sounds like an expensive advertising strategy which is unlikely to catch the attention of GoodGym HQ! 😂

For the remainder of the task we chipped away at the weeds in the bark-filled circle under the second tree. There was much more work to be done here than could be achieved in the time we had left as the weeds were running far more ram-plant, but we made a good start. We all began to run out of grass after an hour and a half of work, so we said our thanks to Pete as we tidied up the tools, then went on with our days – a few GoodGym'ers departed, whilst the majority chose to stay and enjoy a coffee on the lawn in the sunshine 🌞.