Members’ visit to RHS Wisley – 14 September

Our membership of the Royal Horticultural Society entitles us to one free group visit a year to one of their gardens.   This year we are organising a visit to RHS Wisley,  Surrey.

Wisley is the historic home of the Royal Horticultural Society and houses one of the largest plant collections in the world. They have a series of gardens including a showcase vegetable garden, as well as The Glasshouse and a cafe/restaurant.

We need to enter as a group, but once inside can split up into smaller groups.

We will organise car sharing for the journey – if you have a car and can take passengers please let the committee know. Similarly, if you would like to go and need a lift, let the committee know.

A sign up sheet is in the Clubhouse.

Herbs for Health – herb walk for members

Join us on Friday 14 June 6pm-8pm for walk around the site to have a closer look at some helpful medicinal plants that grow around us.

Amanda Rew, medicinal herbalist, will take you through which medicinal herbs are growing on your doorstep, what to use them for as well as when & how to harvest them.

Learn the surprising actions of some of our native plants.

Taste some herbal infusions on the day.

The event will take place from 6pm to 8pm starting at The Clubhouse.

AGM – new committee and priorities agreed

Yesterday we held our Annual General Meeting.   We looked back at the society’s achievements and our finances since the last AGM and agreed the accounts and appointed the auditor.  We also agreed our priorities for the forthcoming year:

  • to continue the Community Spruce programme, including refurbishing the Clubhouse; painting and cleaning the communal facilities, to refurbish Clive’s Kitchen; subject to securing grant funding/fundraising upgrading the plant nursery. We will continuing to enhance the facilities for wildlife and bees to make our site even more environmentally friendly and sustainable.
  • to update and agree our governance arrangements.  We will appoint additional Trustees and set up a quarterly Trustees meeting to scrutinise the site finances and governance.   We will revise the Tenancy Terms and Conditions and the Constitution in preparation for signing the new lease with the council.

We also agreed that we would rename the Clubhouse, the Tom Douglas Clubhouse in recognition of the contribution that our Trustee and former Secretary has made to our allotment site, as well as to allotments in Bromley and beyond. We will have a formal opening ceremony once the refurbishment work has been completed.

Having agreed our priorities the committee stood down and we held an election for the new committee as follows:

Chair:  Linda Phillips MBE

Secretary: Jeannette Henderson

Treasurer: Tony Danford

Committee:  Margaret Anderson, Naslie Brazao, James Edmead, Anne Fautly, Yasemin Kozan, David Leach, Judith Sidaway, Elmer Terry, David Tutt.

We would like to thank those members who stood on the committee since the last election and welcome new committee members.

We would also like to thank James Hilsden of LB Bromley and Patrick Phillips of Idverde for helping with our election administration and for Tony Chase, of BALGF and Jeff Barber of NAS for attending our AGM and for the advice and support they have provided.