Last night we made a return to the garden of the Highfield Unit after a 2 year hiatus. The Highfield is the young people's mental health in-patient unit at Warneford Hospital. Some of the garden has recently been redesigned into a much more inviting space, which was lovely to see.

The garden is divided into 3 sections, so we divided into a trio of teams to weed, prune and lop. We weeded and pruned outside the dining room to give a clearer view of the lovely new garden design, lopped bramble and pulled up nettles in the mosaic garden, and weeded and pruned the shaded corridor space outside some of the bedrooms.

We amassed a large pile of clippings and prunings and worked up a bit of a sweat, so were grateful for the water and biscuits we were given at the end.

Welcome to GoodGym Catriona (Kitty).

Tiny Forest brings the benefits of woodland right into the heart of our cities and urban spaces: connecting people with nature, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as providing nature-rich habitat to support urban wildlife.

Earthwatch is pioneering Tiny Forest in the UK and is conducting a UK-wide research study to help us understand how these super tiny woods have the potential to be super powerful.

Last night Earthwatch Europe launched their Lottery funded partnership with GoodGym at the Littlemore Tiny Forest.

A couple of years ago 600 saplings were planted in a patch of ground 200 metres square (roughly the size of a tennis court), and the plot is now a lovely baby woodland at the end of a wild flower patch.

Earthwatch are collecting data on biodiversity, carbon storage, flood mitigation and thermal comfort in the Tiny Forest in order to see how the scheme could help in urban areas. 100 of the 600 trees in the Littlemore Tiny Forest have been tagged to be regularly monitored, and these were the main focus of our citizen science.

Dividing into trios we made our way around the site checking that the trees were correctly identified in the database, measuring height and girth, and counting the number of stems for multi-stem trees. It turned out to be a very satisfying task - particularly tracking down the last few elusive tagged trees! We managed to find and monitor 58 trees in under an hour.

Other experiments made observations on water soak away and thermal comfort. Tracking the changes over the next few years will be very interesting.

Welcome to GoodGym Mark and Jac. Great to have a visitor from the central team Theresa.

Last night we were asked to return to Cotswold House Eating Disorder Unit to work on the garden. The unit has a pretty courtyard garden filled with aromatic herbs, lavendar and buddleia. It's nicely thought out, with treats for the eyes and the nose, as well as being full of plants which pollinators love. Last year we did a couple of gardening sessions to keep the weeds at bay and as the weather starts to warm up it was high time we returned to give the garden a once-over before the weeds take hold. The pots and planters had been planted up with pansies since out last visit - lovely and cheery - and a general prune of the larger shrubs had obviously been done recently. That meant we didn't need to tackle too much bamboo and could focus on weeding between the paving, digging out long grass encroaching on the borders, and some light pruning and trimming of last year's dead growth to allow the newly emerging shoots to get light and space.

An hour flew by - it's easy to lose track of time when you're busy!

Cotswold House is an award winning specialist adult eating disorders service provided by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. There are 2 two modern eating disorders units in Oxford and Marlborough, Wiltshire. After our day trip to Marlborough to tidy up the garden of the Cotswold House there we were recommende to Oxford site too. Et voila! Cotswold House take 2!

After some minor faffing trying to get the garden gates open, we soon got to work in the walled garden. The Warneford Hospital site is large but only has a very small gardening team, so it's difficult for them to lavish lots of attention on weeding and pruning. The Cotswold House garden used to be looked after by a keen volunteer gardener, but recently it has got a bit overgrown, so secateurs and pruning saws in hand we started to tackle the job.

This turned into one of the most fragrant garden tasks we've ever had, as we lopped back sage (who knew sage grows into a whole woody shrub if you let it?!), rosemary, lavender, and buddleia. Jessy and Sarah did great work clearing a bench from under a tangle of bamboo and roses - looked beautiful in a wild kinda way, but not great for accessing the seat! Others pruned, weeded, and sawed, amassing a large pile of trimmings and weeds. Wheelbarrow crew trekked across the site to dispose of most of it on the big compost heap near the meadow, but there was a small amount left in the garden to be collected another time.

There was even time for a bit of ping pong before we left the garden.

Good work team!

Thanks to our Run Leaders for their help - Ben for leading the run up to Warneford Hospital, and Bethan for coordinating a longer run after the task.

Welcome to GoodGym Joe - lovely to meet you!

We came, we parkran, we pruned, we weeded.

The Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust has an outpost in Wiltshire - the in-patient Eating Disorder Unit, Cotswold House. As we've done regular work with their Oxford-site (Warneford Hospital) they reached out to us to see if we would be able to help with the ED unit garden too. Obviously the distance makes it's impractical to make this a regular thing, but the garden is a small courtyard space so a lot can be achieved on a single community mission. A day trip with a good deed included sounded like a great idea to us, add in a bit of parkrun tourism and it was a done deal!

We started our outing with Marlborough Common parkrun where we got chatting to someone from GoodGym Swindon who filled us in on what's going on in their area. Sadly, no-one from GG Swindon joined us on the task, but fingers crossed we have more success with collaborating next time we're in the area. Then after a coffee stop we headed over to Cotswold House at Savernake Hospital.

Cotswold House was fairly quiet this Saturday morning as many of the patients went home for the weekend, and so we were able to have free run of the garden without getting in anyone's way. Probably a good thing that some of our eclectic conversations weren't overheard by non-GoodGymers; ranging from relative quality of secateurs, to cockchafer beetles, and some light peer-pressure to persuade more GoodGymers to give parkrun a try!

At first glance the garden area looked in pretty good shape and we figured we'd do a little pruning and weeding and be on our way in an hour, but as is often the case, once we got started on the task we discovered that there was more to do than it first seemed. Due to some of the plants attracting clouds of little black flies the pruning had to be more extensive than we'd expected - not too relaxing to sit in a garden surrounded my midgey flies! - and getting to work we uncovered ivy and brambles which needed cutting back before they completely smothered the roses, and several fun garden sculptures which were getting swallowed up by shrubbery. Raking away the dead leaves, some watering, and weeding the pots and raised beds also got done. We even hosed down some of the windows which had got splattered by bird poo and restrung fairy lights.

After 2 hours we'd amassed 18 sacks of prunings!

Post task we hit the market in Marlborough for a picnic lunch in the sunshine, rounding off our day with ice-creams as we headed back to the cars.

What a lovely day :-)