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Outdoors with... Community gardeners The Grief Garden · Outdoors with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_04: From wild swimming to dog walking, bird watching to rock pulling.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: We're going outside to try new things and chat about why those things are not going to be.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'm your host, Sophie, from Yorkshire Wildlife Charter, and I'll be exploring our local landscapes with people who next week.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: I joined Sophie and Lisa at the Living Potential Community Gardens in Weatherbase to explore their project and green garden.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_04: As legacy and in the memory officer at Yorkshire Wildlife Charter.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_04: Their work is very closely aligned with mine.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_04: As I walk down a forest path, I come to a wall garden where I meet them both.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: And we start the session by picking flowers and plucking mint.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: We're going to use this mint in fresh tea while we have a chat.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_04: Hi! You okay?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, great, thank you.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_04: I'm glad I remembered how like to get through the path.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_04: So, yeah, talk to me about what we can see here in this beautiful garden.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Well, um we wanted to have an arch as a transition space from the rest of the world.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: So first you've got the Victorian walls, which helps kind of bring you into the space and separate yourself from where you're coming from, but then we wanted a secondary one, which is the Willow Arch as you enter the space.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_03: We wanted to create a really, really big herb garden.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so we've got lots of mint and rosemary and siege and anything that we could get our hands on really to create um lovely teas from.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um and also some plants that we can harvest for natural crafts, so things like the dogwood over there.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um and yeah, we a lot of the plants have been from local people donating them.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: To be honest, we haven't had a huge budget.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's really beautiful.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_04: The colours are gorgeous.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's like uh I feel like just instantly coming into the space, my my mind feels like super relaxed and like joy.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_04: There's so much joy with just the like also the like levels of like height of all the different plants and the yeah, it's really really beautiful.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_04: This is our beautiful mint garden that you were very much part of creating.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_04: And this is like the mint that you guys pick for in the sessions to have like lovely herbal teas at the end.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've got like three different species of mint.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: We've got I don't know the names of any of them.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: That's fine.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: But we've got this darker one.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: We've got this really, really fluffy guy.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: And then there is another one that I can't quite spot actually.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: It smells amazing.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: It does, it's really oh, and this really, really super dark one, which is which is almost like pepperminty.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that is so lovely.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's really it's been really fun, sort of um picking them and and doing different mixes of the various like species and seeing what it what it's like.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, the tea that we'll drink in a minute will be from this mint right here.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_04: From this mint right here.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_04: Which I just think is so nice because I also think that like sometimes maybe I don't think that I can do that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_04: Do you know what I mean?
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like that you can like grow something and have it then you can like instantly use it and drink it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I think it I've I've got this perception that oh I've got to buy a tea bag with peppermint in it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but you can just do this.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I can grow it.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: And like within the gardening world, everyone's like frustrated with like how mint takes over and stuff.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: But I I just I think like I could have mint teas every year.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's really cool.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_04: And we're gonna pick some flowers as well.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_04: Like with chopping a flower, how do you how would you?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_04: I don't want to do it wrong, but I'd feel like there probably isn't a wrong way.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: Not really.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: I mean I would snip diagonally, yeah.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um and just follow your heart through the garden.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_04: Well, tell me your name and what you do and where we are today.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_03: So my name is Sophie, and I'm one of the co-directors of the Grief Garden.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we are here in the Grief Garden, which we set up in April this year, so it's still a very, very young and very, very new project.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it is a place that we have created with and for people who are experiencing grief to collaboratively design and make a garden together as a place for expressing and exploring grief together.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_03: My background is in collaborative design, so um I do lots of different projects to collaboratively design green spaces with communities, and I guess the grief garden is a kind of example of how we can work together as a community to create um spaces for both people and nature.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's also really interesting because I've come to one of the sessions and I found you guys through the Leeds Community Sauna, which is great, and also another like nice community space that's in Leeds and the Kirkstalka like community farmers there, and then you've got this amazing sauna space that is a lot of lot of love and funding from people that care about those sorts of like nice start-up green spaces.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_04: So there's quite like a nice link of, I guess you say quite a few people found you through the community.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: Our flyer at the sauna has been the most fruitful flyer we really.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_04: Um talk to me about like the idea of the grief garden and kind of maybe where it started from and and how it it became more than just an idea.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean connecting to the sauna really, I think probably one reason why people from the sauna like it is because it is community-led uh and it's different who a lot of the grief kind of spaces that certainly I've ever experienced in that um we create it together and it's not prescriptive and it's not uh a one size fits all methodology and and it's not um top-down.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um really it is a space where any expression of grief is welcome.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it's a space where you can take it for your own and do whatever you want to do within it alongside other people.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a space where grief can exist, which I think is quite rare within society.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: There aren't really many physical spaces where you can enact or be present with your grief with other people.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_04: It can be quite isolating.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_04: For people listening that don't know, my role at the Yorkshire Well I stress is the legacy and in memory officer.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: So on a regular basis, I'm dealing with people that are experiencing grief or are preparing for grief or have gone through grief, and actually, what I've found from the role is that people experience a vast different array of emotions and also feel like they can communicate in very kind of different ways, and sometimes feel like they can't express how they feel or don't have space to do that.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and I also think so many people are experiencing grief in a variety of different ways, it's not just like a one size fits all thing, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that was really uh refreshing to be in a space and come to and and feel like actually this community of people here are kind of feeling lots of different emotions, but and and they're experiencing so many vast different things.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_04: Um but to just be able to be and also physically do do something with with your hands felt really quite um yeah, really quite freeing.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_04: This week we welcome a special guest wise owl, Tom Barker from Octopus Legacy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_04: We have partnered with Octopus Legacy to offer our supporters the opportunity to write a free will.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_04: Tom's here to give you some insight into October's Free Wills Month charity campaigns and his role at Octopus Legacy.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, just to introduce myself, my name's Tom.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm one of the charity partnership managers uh at Octopus Legacy.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we have about 400 charity partners, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust being one of them.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I support our charity partners with their legacy fundraising work.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: So a little bit about the company.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we were started in 2018 by our founder Sam.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um so Sam sadly lost his mum in a car accident in 2016, um, and he was partly in charge of everything that needs to happen after someone close to you dies.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So things like applying for probate, um, closing accounts, organising a funeral, house removals, etc.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: He found everything uh very frustrating, uh very inefficient, and very cold.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's lots of different agents and a huge amount of legal and admin work that you have to do um during a really difficult time in your life.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and he thought there must be a better way of doing this.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's why he started the company.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, we're here to help people um deal with death.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So um that involves uh preparing for death, so things like wills, uh lasting power of attorneys, life insurance, um, and all the things that come afterwards as well.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So things like probate.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: As mentioned, we work with uh 400 charity partners, about 180 of those partners are on our campaigns.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we run uh two free will campaigns uh every year.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: So our spring one runs from the beginning of February to the end of March, and our autumn one runs from the beginning of September through to the end of October.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so we promote the campaign through things like Money Saving Expert.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: We get quite a few recommendations through Martin Lewis on his show and guest appearances such as this morning.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: We work with affiliates, so content creators and influencers.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: We work with corporate networks, um, offering it to their staff, so loads of different digital channels uh to help get as much exposure uh for the wonderful charities that we work with.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_04: Talk to me about that like idea of like physically doing things with the earth, because I think that's something that makes this space like really unique.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so there are a couple of different things that we're kind of testing out, I guess, and like trying to learn with and from at the Grie Garden.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think the first is um building that reciprocal relationship with nature so that we together are actively working alongside nature to support the garden to thrive, and in doing so, it supports us through our grief process.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_03: So we're wanting to learn a bit around how that can work.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think it's also a space where you can kind of enact some internal processes with it within the physical world, so whether that's taking a really long time to care for a really small and precious plant, or whether that's doing some really, really physical labour to kind of destroy some earth to get some anger out.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um within the kind of the garden, you can choose which what activities that you want to participate in and what kind of energy you want to kind of experiment or practice or or or express.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think it's also been a place that can provide also other articulations of grief too.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: So through the pilot that we've just done, it seems to have given people a kind of indirect material through which they can kind of metaphorically explore their grief.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: So um one of the people who are coming along over a course of weeks kind of really, really connected with a the compactness of the soil and how tending to the soil each week and digging within the soil each week could release that sense of compactness within them and enable kind of nutrients and um water and all the good stuff to kind of get within their soil.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I so I think yeah, being within the garden, you notice things, you observe things within the real world, but you also notice things and observe things within yourself, and it kind of provides you with an indirect language through which you can talk about your grief in a very, very personal way, but in a way that it doesn't feel too personal to share with others.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not a space that we kind of come and share learns about our grief stories.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, we talk a lot through the plants, and in that way it feels really, really personal and connecting, but it doesn't feel too raw for people to share with others.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, lots of people are in lots of different places with their grief story, and sometimes that can feel too much to us.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_04: I feel like something that you both do really well here is like hold that space and talk to me about like how you create a space that allows for kind of sensitive conversations and also how you might like hold those sensitive conversations as well.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think actually something that I maybe see a lot is that people are maybe scared about talking about death or grief because they're not sure what that person is wants or needs from that conversation, and so actually, maybe naturally people shut themselves off from opening up and talk talking about those things, whether it's about their own feelings or about people who they're related to or or friends with going through like a grief process.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_04: How do you hold that space for people and and what's important about having like sensitive conversations?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's one of the aims that we've got here is to build confidence within ourselves and and people who come here around talking about their grief, death and dying, both within their lives but also within society and beyond the garden.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_03: I think we're still learning about how to do that.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I personally, my personal belief is that the people who are responsible for doing that is the community and people and humans.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it those things happen.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think that healing happens and you know other people will think differently.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it happens within kind of clinical and institutional spaces.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: I think it happens within um community connections and within everyday spaces and within our houses, within our shops, within our doctors, within our um playgrounds.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that's the principle that we're building on is that we as humans can have these conversations with each other, and through doing so, they're the most healing conversations that you can have because those are the connections that will sustain you into the future, and if you can have them within your daily life, then that's uh um something that will last for the rest of your life.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we have got a lot of inspiration from the death cafe movement.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I've also been facilitating Leeds Death Cafe with my friend Roger.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um and yeah, those that model for having a conversation about grief, death and dying has been really, really helpful, particularly around empowering and educating everyone to be able to have those conversations and not feel afraid of doing it wrong.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I think yeah, we're building on the death cafe here at the garden, but with the added kind of material and context of plants and horticulture and nature.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the amount of people that have such incredible, like fond memories on one of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust's reserves, and they want to be able to like honour or celebrate a loved one who loved that space, um, or like people that leave donations in their wills for the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust because they had so many incredible memories for one that there's down the road from them, or people that have moved away from Yorkshire but grew up there or went on holiday there.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_04: Like, there's something really intrinsic about nature and like memory and like the idea of of life from like my role at the trust, but also from what you guys are doing for how death and life intersect with with nature.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's just a really, really interesting topic, which I've probably we could probably talk about for hours.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but like seeing something like physically grow because you've put it into the ground and helped it, and then you could keep coming back and back, and it's growing and beautiful, and then it it might die, and then two years later come back again.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_04: There's something quite reassuring.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, reassuring, yeah, about that.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_04: Is it a good time for tea?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay, nice, which is exciting because it's from the mint that's literally right here.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: Um, yeah, so tell me your name and what your role is.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Lisa, and I am co-director of the Grief Garden.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: I sort of came to the project through experiencing the passing of my dad.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: I have a background in psychology and have been always kind of really interested in supporting people through uh hard times in their lives, um, and have recently, after the passing of my dad, also similarly to Sophie, sort of um started reconnecting with nature and sort of started, you know, really more actively caring for it.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: I um I grew up in Russia and Siberia, and my grandparents um lived a very sort of like um, you know, providing for yourself type of life.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like my grandma had a vegetable and a fruit patch and cared for that.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And when I was growing up, she she taught me a lot of that, and I felt really connected to it and felt like I had skills and knowledge within that um that I pr pretty much lost after moving to London and just like really getting lost in that like um urban sort of uh landscape and just really disconnecting from it.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um but after the passing of my dad, I really felt that um I couldn't super comfortably exist in my grief around people, whereas existing in my grief around nature felt really, really sort of welcoming and really a lot easier, and it kind of felt um like you were talking about um observing death and life within nature.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um it felt really like understanding and accepting of the concept of grief somehow.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, after meeting Sophie and us forming our own little coming here on Thursdays and just doing as community volunteers and volunteering in the garden as a as a large and doing a lot of vegetable growing and stuff like that.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um it was it was just kind of it just kind of arose the idea of forming the grief garden.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_04: Talk to me about physically starting like something like this, like practically, like someone might be listening going, that sounds really cool, I've got an idea.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_04: How do you get something like this off the ground?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean we were definitely massively fortunate in um being allowed to take up this space within this Victorian garden.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: It was entirely neglected, so it was just covered in like grass and and weeds.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was quite a task to undertake at first.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we we pr we practically started with basically ripping everything out of the garden.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um we invited sort of the wider community to come and help us prepare before we ever did the pilot program to because we didn't want um the space to feel too, you know, sort of overwhelming and intense uh for the members coming to the sessions.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um so we did a lot of just preparing the soil, putting some basic structures in, like the seating area that we're in right now, the paths around.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it was god, it was like 30 30 people together, something like that, that helped us with just that general sort of setup.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: But it was it was really amazing how we just put a call out, and there was there was a lot of interest, um, and a lot of people were quite eager to come and help out with that.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_04: So we've got like the location, and you kind of got that starting point.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_04: How did those kind of first sessions go?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_04: What were some of like the actual like practical things that you were doing, the plants that you were putting in, and also how were the like the conversations and the kind of the community growing around that as well?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um the first few sessions, it was really really super bare.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: We kind of started with building around, we've got a lovely pond in the right kind of at the centre of the garden, and we wanted to keep that as a feature and started building around the pond.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know about practically, but I do uh I wanted to talk about um something that's that we found as like a methodology that has worked really well for the pilot of a lot of people, a lot of the members that came seem to get a lot of value out of the sort of collective solitude aspect of being in the garden and of the session.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's kind of a large enough space.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: where you can feel like you're together, you can be together in a group, but also kind of do your own thing.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: And there's something, there's something really beautiful and really connecting about that.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: I found that even I have felt like a really large amount of sort of like emotional intimacy with people who I haven't actually really spoken much to.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's just we shared a couple of hours of being in the space together and tending to the garden together, separately, but together.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: And there's um it's it's something that's um really stood out as a sort of um yeah as a way that why this kind of works.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: I found one of the hardest uh like parts of grief uh being acceptance like that that um idea of radical acceptance of accepting reality um as it is without resistance or denial or judgment and I felt like um the garden and gardening um really really helped me sort of like train that muscle in my brain of like radical acceptance of accepting things as they are because you know you put a plant in the ground and sometimes it dies and that's fine.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: The soil has moved on the earth around it has moved on.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: Everything has accepted that.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_04: On that do you have a favourite plant that you like have loved growing or is there anything that sticks out that you're like oh actually I've got like an affinity with that so I'm actually what I've learned about myself uh through this journey is I love having an enemy.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: I love having an enemy in the garden.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: I absolutely love it.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because this was absolutely covered in weeds I spent uh very like large amounts of time just absolutely digging docks out like I have to get to the bottom of that roof.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: I guess it's taking that almost like protector role of the garden like I am I'm like guarding the garden from the things that want to like infiltrate up on it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: So rather than having like a favourite plant that I've enjoyed planting or anything like that I've actually just really enjoyed um coming here week by week and getting rid of the the weeds and another thing of like the mint.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's mint everywhere here we've got like this one section that's a mint garden.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I really love kind of going on a hunt and finding little bits of mint and just taking them into their place.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_04: I like what you said about having an enemy in nature because um the Himalayan balsam obviously an invasive species and I went um on like a volunteer day with some of the team down to Gargrave and now I can't go on a walk without seeing it and being like okay and now we're having a lovely conversation sorry I've got to stop and I'm gonna pull this Himalayan balsam and stamp on it so that I feel you in that respect.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: And you feel incredible I'm avenging all of this like don't you worry guys don't you worry all the plants around I've got this.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah yeah on the mint guard because we had so much mint we really decided let's like use it the best that we can and and during all of our sessions through our 12 week program pilot we always had fresh mint tea from the garden um at the at the sort of end.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because the way that the sessions were structured was we start with a sort of like introduction and a check-in and people are welcome to either check in on like a zoomed in or zoomed out scale you know like what are you arriving like today or you can talk about the larger picture of what brings you to the grief garden.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then we have a session of gardening and then we come back together and share some fresh mint tea and do sort of check out and talk about what um was brought up during gardening for people.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I found that the the the fresh mint tea was really sort of like became really a staple it really um it almost like signaled to my brain even that it's it's now time to kind of like sit down and start the conversation which was has been really nice.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited to do more um with the herbs and the plants that we've got around here.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: Sophie do you have um a favourite plant or thing that you've grown here or like an enemy like we just to be honest this and this is bad horticulture so I really shouldn't be admitting it but what I've learned about myself is I really like moving things around.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_03: Nice I'm a nightmare for moving things around and yeah I'm constantly being like oh that's happy and established but I really want it over there.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: I think yeah there's something about kind of commitment and you know fluidity and just wanting things to constantly be moving.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean for me it's been really really strange coming on a weekly basis.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_03: I'm self-employed and I really find it really hard to form routines so coming here on a weekly basis has been very very very very strange for me but it has helped me develop other routines in my life which has been really really anchoring so I call Thursdays now um toast Thursdays and every time I get home I have toast I have marmalade and I watch an episode of One Tree Hill and it's the best day of my week.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: I found it really centering and grounding being here regularly on a weekly basis and just watching the way that week to week everything shifts and everything changes.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've talked about that because on the on the way in there's a massive amount of wild garlic and pay like watching that has been really really fun and we've we've both said it's really like there's something really really enjoyable about um coming here on a weekly basis and looking and observing the nature and really noticing it and noticing like oh that's changed or like that's changed or that died or that popped up that wasn't here.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah that that sort of like routine and also associating that with um allowing yourself the the space to like engage with your grief has been really helpful because it's it's hard to um it's hard to make time for it um to to really um feel your grief I think a lot of the time because we're obviously so focused on productivity and doing things and getting things done and grief is very um in opposition to productivity it doesn't it doesn't go well with that.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god wow wow is that a red guy wow yeah but yeah and and and all of the wildlife that we that you observe while sitting in here is absolutely incredible it's I've also just really enjoyed watching like the bees and everyone else kind of come and sit on the flowers it's been really really nice.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah what types of wildlife do you get here we just saw a hummingbird hawk moth and a red cat in the sky at the same time what other things um we've got a visiting family of ducks who use this as their holiday home they have a little swim and a bath in the in the in the little pond and I think they live uh on the bigger ponds over there um I mean just seeing the amount of like pollinators over this year compared to last year because we have introduced so many more kind of species and flowers has been really really beautiful it feels like it's come to life in a completely new way and also restoring the pond I think has helped with that because that was kind of completely dry and empty and it does have a crack in it but we a couple of weeks ago we kind of restored it.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: But that is also another thing witnessing the the effect that the drought had very directly on on the space was very like it's kind of an emotional thing to see and and I I mean obviously it it affected it if it's affected all of our nature.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_04: At the trust we've just done a big appeal for Ask and Bog and a lot of the appeal there has been driven by to keep water in the bog because obviously if water levels go down and it's really hot and there's drought then it can't stay in the kind of boggy properties that it is and then from my role perspective there are people that love and care for Ask and Bog and we've this new boardwalk's gone in place and we've got plaques on these boardwalks in dedication for people loved ones whether there's like an 80th birthday plaques there's plaques for people who have died and they want to celebrate the place that they loved there are plaques for um a little girl's got one for her primary school and all the funds raised through those plaques have gone towards keeping the bog wet and so even though it's been like a really hot kind of scary summer these people who really care about it have have helped to keep it wet and and keep it surviving and their plaques there are there in like dedication of like their loved ones that love that space as well so it's kind of like a nice link I guess back into like people and um and grief and like celebrating life in a way that they can like feel they're helping out nature.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Hi I'm Ian Davis I'm the head of fundraising at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and philanthropy is a really transformative um area of our organisation so I joined the trust two years ago and I began the journey of building the program and that has led to a lot of innovation on how we protect and develop um giving across the whole of Yorkshire to support our green spaces and our resources and all later projects such as the heat program, the week program and we're a very ambitious charity we want to achieve restoring 30% of Yorkshire's nature by 2030 so that requires a lot of support from generous people across Yorkshire and further beyond as well.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: So innovating is one of the key things that we're trying to do and I believe that when we have you know passionate people working for life who's delivering the podcast today and developing to celebrate the lives of people as part of the campaign it enables people to get involved have something tangible to remember the people that have supported us so memory products and celebration products are something that I'm very excited by and you know there are boxes, there are food boxes there are fences and everyone can have a little piece of memory on one of our nature as well.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: In the wider team we're looking for people to support our species recovery programs we're looking for people to support all the different areas that we're working in and the team has done an amazing job of growing our support and developing the program so it's it's in a really positive position in the organisation moving forward.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: I think one of the kind of main questions that well actually I think it's come out of the grief garden it wasn't a question at the beginning was around how can grief become a catalyst for ecological restoration and and I think to be honest quite a lot of like a few people who have come here have come here with ecological grief and there is a huge intersection between the grief felt within people who have lost a loved one and grief felt for the climate and I think we're still figuring out how we are part of that conversation and what the grief garden does within that conversation but I think that we know from being here and interacting with people and interacting with nature that grief is a really powerful catalyst for people connecting to nature but also restoring nature to and and I guess yeah we are interested in how can you facilitate that that power how can you facilitate that energy how can you facilitate whatever on earth is going on within us when we're experiencing grief for the good of of nature and and for the good of people and how can we recognize that really they're one in the same and and yeah what will be good for us is good for nature because we are all nature many people have kind of asked us questions around like well why are you calling it a grief garden that sounds so sad and that sounds so depressing and why would someone want to go there but I think for us it is about kind of reclaiming grief and celebrating grief and and being strong in grief and accepting grief rather than trying to reframe it as as something that's restful and something that's peaceful and something that you get through by sitting in a beautiful place and reflecting because the reality is for me at least that it's not like that at all and and the garden provides a more active way of processing that.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: So my last two questions for the day imagine we're here in a hundred years time what do you hope to see and what do you hope for kind of the future of nature?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's really sad because all I want to say is just like for it not to die because it it feels it feels difficult currently um to try and imagine a sort of positive more like utopian situation when when you know the climate crisis feels so heavy you know because really yeah I would I would love to see a lot of like actual rewilding.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the woodland that's behind us is really beautiful and really lovely and sort of really like wild which is brilliant and I think I just want to see more of that.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: I really love to see more habitats being allowed to sort of be taken over by nature and taken over by wildlife and and for us to step back.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_03: But yes I think that grief really does have the power to support people to restore nature.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think about how connected we've managed to feel over the course of for me three years you one year one more one or more years to the natural landscape and also to ourselves so imagine if every single person who lost someone or 50% of the people who lost someone had the chance to have someone guide them in a way to come to be more connected to nature and to learn how to support it to thrive.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_03: If 50% of people who lost someone could have a program that would support them to do that then we've got a really really good chance I've got a great chance yeah so I would like to see in a hundred years time some kind of organization the grief garden the grief garden CIC that figures out somehow a way of harnessing this this energy of grief towards ecological restoration and um can provide some kind of model or framework or journey so that people can experience what that is like.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_04: Okay and my final questions today are if you had one takeaway for our listeners one around grief and one around nature what would you like them to take away?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think grief is really hard and I think it's very different for each person and it it's not like one set feeling it's often very very complicated with lots of feelings of guilt and anger and all sorts of different things that people can't necessarily imagine unless you have experienced it.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_03: And even if you have experienced it you can't really imagine someone else's experience.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I think in terms of grief I I would just offer um kindness and generosity to yourself and and knowing that it does change and it does transform and um to not be afraid of that and to know that um yeah it will change you and it will change your life but that there is some hope to be found within it even though it might not feel like it at one time.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: In terms of nature I I think I would issue a direct instruction to go to a garden for an hour and to touch things and to smell things and to look at things and to explore the space and and yourself within it and give yourself 60 minutes of doing that of uninterrupted time and see what happens.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think in terms of nature I'm going to take directly from my personal experience and sort of I think when we're talking about um nature and engaging with it a lot of it sounds really like soft and kind of flowery and I just want to say that if you're someone that's feeling a lot of frustration and a lot of anger and a lot of really like sort of agitated emotion there's space for that within gardening.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's you can you can absolutely just go and dig and rip things out of the ground and and it's really it really really is really cathartic when you're thinking about gardening and it feels maybe a little bit too like soft and delicate for you.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't have to be like that at all.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: There's so many different ways to engage with nature and gardening and grief wise yeah sort of going back to talking about the the world that we live in and how fast and bustling and and productivity focused it all is.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's really really easy to get lost in that um I know that I've heard from somebody you know somebody saying like oh I I lost this loved one 11 years ago and I just I don't feel like I've had I've taken any time to process that because I've just been doing things.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess I would really say that purposefully taking some time out of your week maybe once a week just even by yourself and however you want um whatever you feel like doing just sort of connecting to the feeling of grief and what it what it feels like in your body or maybe just connecting to your loved one that you have lost.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's really really easy to kind of live with grief in an almost associative state of of just like it being this thing that you you're constantly shoving into the background or or just um making it quiet because it's it's difficult.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I think purposefully setting yourself a time and a space for engaging with it is one of the most helpful things that I've found in sort of processing it.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_04: Well amazing thanks so much for having me here today.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you thank you Sashi has been amazing thanks guys.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for coming outdoors with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust the Greavegarden is a community project that invites people who are experienced in grief to work together to co-create a garden as a place of acceptance connection and meaning the next event is celebrating the other lots and WebSocks on Sundays the 1st of November to find out more visit wwwthegreavegardencic.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_04: And click on to get involved for their next website sponsors for a while feature that's one of the most lasting ways we can support the Oxford Wildlife chatter is by leaving the case in the office and new well with our free online wheel writing status and taking the online score of the live we have done on both of us.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_04: So also each for me to get into your will to find out interested in celebrating a lot of one on our side from this we have the pleasure of arranging many special treaties and dedications to your family and friends to visit our website to see what we have available to join us next week or will be headed outside of the office to avoid it to meet outside with a mirror, an urban conservationist and online content creator to you outdoors