Working with Heath Hands

I would hesitate to say that the steamingly hot mug of tea and handful of biscuits that you get half way through your gardening session (here being dispensed by the lovely Ash in the Hill Garden) is the main attraction of working with Heath Hands – but it certainly puts a kick in your spade! Not that most volunteers lack enthusiasm – far from it. Regulars do two or three sessions a week and some have been volunteering for years.

Tea aside, I suspect that it is the variety of tasks one can be asked to undertake that attracts most of us – from weeding and raking the gravel beneath the pergola in the Hill Garden….

to digging out the run away ditches down at the bottom end of Sandy Heath.

This glorious variety is of course thanks to the glorious variety of Hampstead Heath itself which includes not only dense and open woodland (constantly needing to be cleared of self rooting saplings), 13 ponds of various sizes, sphagnum moss bogs, open meadow land, the multiple habitats of Golders Hill Park, the Old Orchard Garden with its willow weave tunnels and the manicured pefection of Lord Leverhulme’s Hill House garden – and that is by no means all.

My apprenticeship so far has taken me ditching both in Sandy Heath and up the near Stock Pond (Sandy Heath where the ditches were filled with gloriously soft leaf mould that you just wanted to take home with you was certainly the easier task), hacking back brambles in the Kenwood woods, hacking back more brambles in the sphagnum moss bog – a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of the moss that is threatened by the brambles….

…and battling with the equally invasive comfrey in the Old Orchard Garden. (Like brambles a mature comfrey plant will send its tentacles 20 feet across its terrain and dig its roots in just as far down.) This whole area was covered waist high when we started on it but we did manage to get it cleared.

For long time readers of this blog, the Old Orchard Garden is the secret garden that I discovered when I first arrived in Highgate. It normally accommodates children and all kinds of wonderful activities but was of course closed for 18 months thanks to COVID during which time it has got seriously overgrown. The day we were they it was chucking it down, although, thanks to my £25’s worth of Screwfix workman’s waterproofs I remained dry and warm as toast. So while my fellow volunteers tried to rein in the the willow arches and corrall the enormous piles of leaves, I got stuck into the comfrey. Here is our mentor, Rory, through the berries by the gate.

Another hugely productive morning was spent down by the ponds and water garden at the bottom of Golders Hill Park. This area too had got seriously overgrown during lockdown but there was a big team of us that set to work on it.

And look what we achieved!!

That morning was also enlivened by the arrival of two guys who had come to measure the depths of the ponds. To our, and their, amusement they told us that they would normally be sounding out the North Sea around oil rigs, or at the very least deep water harbours, so Golders Hill water garden involved a bit of a change of pace.

Two other super productive mornings  have been spent in the Hill House garden (of which more in a future post). A hard hour’s work raking up leaves from under low hanging, prickly trees to let the bulbs grow through was rewarded with a very satisfactory 20 minutes reducing this over grown patch of dead ferns to order…..

And then yesterday I was put to work on this pathway in the kitchen garden where the sage, rosemary and santalina had got so out of hand that the path was completely impassable. Ash, the head gardener at the Hill House Garden is keen to keep the herbs big and soft and blowsy rather than tightly trimmed, but these were way beyond that….

I am not sure that I may not have got a bit too carried away with my secateurs – but they will always grow back!

Next week I am off to Highgate Woods – no idea what task awaits me there – and then there is a break over Christmas. Roll on January – I’ll be rarin’ to get back on the job.

Heath Hands

Although all I do for Heath Hands is garden, they do a great deal more.

• There is a good deal of monitoring wild life of the heath (the sphagnum moss but also butterflies, grass snakes, stag beetles and funghi).
• They host schools groups, community and disability groups on the heath but also run nature and craft workshops around the borough.
• For the general public there are a range of activities from forest bathing to nordic walking – or wreath making!
• Heath Hands also run corporate volunteering days which are extremely successful and popular.
• Or, of course, you can just support their activities by joining as a Friend which also gets you priority access to events and a discount on merchandise.

Check out their website to find out more about them.