Living Gardeners Collective:

The Living Gardeners Collective was born out of a desire to work collaboratively as a group of ecologically minded maintenance gardeners who want to provide a gardening service that is affordable to both clients and gardeners.

The Living Gardeners Collective is currently made up of three gardeners who took part in the Sustainable Maintenance Gardening Volunteer Placement with Organiclea in 2022 - Hugo, Ana and Jonny. Alongside our work in private gardens, we also work in other capacities in community growing spaces, although these are typically difficult spaces to find paid work in. For the three of us, maintenance gardening has become a way to financially support the other work that we do, whilst hoping to help people nurture their gardens at home to be productive, beautiful and ecologically sound. By setting up the Living Gardeners Collective, we have started on a journey to try to work out how we can best support each other and others who may want to join us in the future.

At present, we are a group of three sole traders who aspire to grow into a supportive network of gardeners who are able to work together with trust and to share resources, knowledge and skills to not only make gardening accessible as a career to ourselves and others, but as an affordable, enjoyable and nourishing way of supporting ourselves in our lives. So far we have managed to pull together our vision, mission and aims for the collective and are currently in the process of working out how best to structure ourselves. This is of course an ongoing process and we recognise that the structure and ways in which members of the Living Gardeners Collective work together will remain fluid and ever changing(/improving) based upon the needs of those who make up the collective.