Lucy’s Garden

Nine year old Lucy Flynn, is to receive a kidney transplant from her brave Dad, Geoff on Friday August, 23rd. Sasha’s best friend Becky, also lost her beloved partner Robbie at Easter (2013). Robbie left three children, Jessie, Layla, and Charlie. Inspired by Lucy’s warmth and resilience, and Robbie’s kids loss, Sasha decided to turn the walled garden she inherited with her sister Katharine into a butterfly reserve for children.

Lucy’s Garden is a project which brings children to a beautiful secret walled garden in which they create a reserve for colourful butterflies. Sherfield Hall Walled Garden is a remnant of the original Sherfield Park which is now almost completely covered by new residential development. Somehow unspoilt by all the changes that have been wrought all around it, the Garden is an oasis of calm and beauty. Together, over time, the children will turn this currently overgrown natural space into a beautiful garden where butterflies such as the dramatic peacock, the fragile comma and the gorgeous red admiral can flourish. Planting food plants such as lilac, clovers and cuckoo plants, dog violet and foxgloves, the children will learn about the creation of life and how to nurture growth and beauty.

They will clear some areas while allowing others to remain wilder. They will create spaces for people to rest and longer term, the garden may become a focus for encouraging residents of surrounding houses to make space for butterfly plants in their gardens, thus creating a network of spaces for these fragile and symbolic animals. The young people, many vulnerable, bereaved or suffering long term illness, will experience the satisfaction of their own labours growing and forming homes for wildlife and forever, they will have somewhere to come to just be.