Flourish is a Community Interest Company and social enterprise. They run a vibrant Community Hub within Woodfield Community Park which is part of Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust and is adjacent to the Tickhill Road Hospital site.
Set up in 2014, Flourish has multi-use spaces for community with cabins and outbuildings and encompasses an almost 200-year-old walled garden and surrounding buildings and green space. When visiting the site, you walk through old peach gardens filled with fig trees and beehives and past polytunnels and glasshouses filled with fruit.
This impressive site was originally a private estate built in the 1830s by the local Banks family. The walled garden and grounds set up to provide fruit veg and flowers to the home. After the 1st world war in the 1920s (pre-establishment of the NHS), the site was sold to the local authorities who set up a health and welfare board to create to create what then became, St Catherines mental health institution which accommodated 600 patients, who continued the farming and growing activity.
Recently modernised, Flourish is now an impressive hive of activity. In 2023-24 over 3,000 people attended community events here and they collaborated with 30 voluntary and local organisations such as the Yorkshire Bike Shack which promotes active travel and supports bike maintenance.
Their community café, which uses the produce grown in the garden, attracts over 200 visitors a day and is used a great deal by patients, staff and the ambulance staff at Tickhill Road Hospital, as well as the public who walk their dogs through the site.
NHS Forest talked with Shelley and Rob who are part of the team of trained gardeners. They support the work across Flourish’s green space running regular gardening groups, vocational training and managing a growing number of people wishing to volunteer their skills. In 2023-24 they had 47 registered volunteers and an average of 165 people attended Flourish programmes every week. This includes 235 referrals for community, vocational or volunteering programmes.
Shelley is an RHS trained horticulturalist who previously worked teaching horticulture in prisons. She applied to work at Flourish on a friend’s recommendation and is now a horticulture support worker. She loves working with a variety of people as well as thinking about how different people work together. Shelley often leads the weekly gardening groups, which are made up of up to 13 people who are referred for a variety of reasons through a green social prescribing programme. Someone may join in who has been part of a mental health group and find themselves working next to a retiree and someone else with a disability. For Shelley it is important that is space is created where people mix, feel safe and welcome. One participant remarked that attending groups and activities “helps your mental health… when you’re feeling really stressed… Nature keeps your mind at ease…”
Everyone’s the same when they’re working in the soil. It’s a very levelling experience and everybody just gets stuck in.
Lizzie Degerdon, Senior Occupational Therapist at Flourish
Rob, another gardener at Flourish, says this role has helped his skills significantly when it came to communicating horticultural tasks to people of varying ability. The full range of work in the garden is vast, from sowing seeds, to planting out, selling plants, harvesting crops and involves a wide range of skills. Tailoring the tasks to groups is challenging but incredibly rewarding. Taking into account the group dynamics, it can be a sophisticated task to manage well.
Expanding out from the productive walled garden, the Flourish team are putting new areas into production. When Rob started working for Flourish, one of the first projects, he did was planting the 40 espaliered apples and crab apples with a group of people on a vocational training course. Flourish also run green skills courses supported by the UK Prosperity Fund to support people struggling with accessing employment. These courses provide varied transferable skills, green skills and landscaping training. In the upcoming weeks the students will be planting an additional 27 pear trees to continue these rows of espaliered trees this season.
The NHS Forest’s free fruit trees are only available until March 2025, apply through the NHS Forest website.
The planting of these fruit trees will be used to teach the students about bed prep, tree planting, tree pruning and training. To make the most out of having an orchard Rob and Shelley advise, working with third sector partners to support their care and trying to integrate the tree care into nature-based work with volunteers where you can. A lot of the fruit tree maintenance is undertaken as part of the training they run.
Being around others with different conditions makes me realise I’m not the only person struggling. I feel comfortable and safe. I love it.
Participant of the vocational training
Rob thinks that the most impactful project they have done is to introduce beehives with the support of local beekeepers. Not only do they help with pollination, but they really seem to have captured the imagination of the public. People’s curiosity about the hives sparks all sorts of conversations around climate change and pollinators.
Although the value of the orchard is firstly to support the bees and the wider biodiversity, produce is prepared in the onsite café for visitors to enjoy. Recently, on an autumnal theme, spiced apple cupcakes were on the menu, made by people on Flourish’s vocational catering skills programmes who have long-term conditions or disabilities. There is an infamous jelly made from the crab apples dotted around the site and the old peach garden and chutney from the fruits of the fig trees. From the walled garden, bags of the produce are available to customers. Carrots and cabbages are grown to make their café coleslaw.
The Yorkshire bike shack have a school holiday programme where school children come for cookery activities. The students have made use of the produce and loved picking the mulberries from the enormous old tree. The students also learned how vegetables grow in the walled garden and saw plants they have never seen before. They got especially excited by peas in their pods and were thrilled to take them back to their parents and share the magic of fresh nourishing food.
Produce from the land and the trees provides nourishment for the community, it is a medium for learning and therapy as well as supporting the site’s biodiversity. The enterprise element sits within the green space at Flourish and provides vital opportunities for people from all walks of life and from all generations. It is a fantastic example of using green space for community care.
We want to hear the creative ways you are using your fruit trees at your sites! Contact us via email – info@nhsforest.org