This morning, six GoodGymmers and their dog (😍) met up to help Stephens House and Gardens in Barnet (including Veronique in her first ever GoodGym good deed!! Awesome stuff!)

Stephens House and Gardens were left in trust for the people of Finchley by Henry "Inky" Stephens. Inky made his name in indelible ink (hence the apt moniker), and was equally keen to leave his mark on society through various philanthropic acts. Although the Gardens are open to the public, they're not technically a public park and so they often arrange volunteering days for help with what some gardening maintenance.

Today, our task was to help out by clearing up leaves (to be honest, most gardening tasks until February will probably involve leaf clearing in some form or other. To expand on Paul's comment below: it's a leaf-fall job, but someone's got to do it).

As we started to rake up the leaves, the Head Gardener gave us one clear direction: "Please rake everything up into one big pile of leaves so I can bag it all up tomorrow". However, with high winds forecast, as more and more volunteers started to filter in, we decided to use the extra manpower to fill builder's bags with the leaves and to drag them off somewhere into the distance (I didn't get close enough to see where, but I'm assuming that they ended up somewhere useful).

A seemingly infinite amount of raking, scooping and dragging later, the area we were working in looked much clearer (at least, we were able to see the green, green grass of ground!), and we enjoyed some mini cupcakes and that smug feeling of having accomplished something before heading home.