Root and branch

9 Goodgymers helped their local community in Richmond
Peter Marsh
Sam
Ken MacKenzie
JP
Jack Concanon
Sofia
1 / 28
Richmond

Saturday 1st October 2022

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Sam
Sam

REPORT WRITER

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Report written by Ken MacKenzie

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9 GoodGym members joined several local volunteers from St Mary Magdalene Church on a beautifully sunny Saturday morning in central Richmond to start work on restoring the setting to the Grade II listed War Memorial in the church graveyard.

Ken was running the task and briefed us on cutting down the 6 cypress trees that were obscuring and threatening the monument. These were recently small clipped shrubs but will soon grow over 20m tall and were already over 2.5m tall having grown a metre in the past year alone. There was a risk that these would undermine the foundations to the Memorial and were already obscuring the words.

In 15 minutes we had cut all the cypress down and thought we were done. But no, the roots all need to come out and we needed to cut all the piles of branches into small bits to fit into a 1 ton dumpy bag for garden waste composting. That was the hard part! The group got stuck in though, with Peter taking on the fearsome roots with help from Chris, Sofia (on her first mission!) and Sam (and the Vicar and one of her team!) while most others got on with chopping up the branches, occasionally jumping in the bag to pack them down.

It was a great task and we will be returning in late October to replant with a range of seasonal perennials and flowers in time for Remembrance Day - sign up here! https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/restoration-of-the-war-memorial-and-gardens-at-st-mary-magdelen-92cf9788-22bf-4f39-82f9-cc3f412b942b


This task supported
St Mary Magdelene Church, Richmond
War memorial and gardens for wildlife habitat and community use

Restoring the WWI and WWII War memorial and rennovating the surrounding gardens for wildlife habitat and community use.

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Discuss this report
Liz
Liz (She/her)

Mon 3rd Oct 2022 at 9:03am

Really excellent work 😍

Join us on our next session

Richmond

Gardening at GoodGym sponsored riverside Three Pigeons Plot and monthly social drinks
🗓Tomorrow 6:45pm

Helping to keep the Richmond Riverside blooming and beautiful.

+4
Anita
Victoria Foster
Ken MacKenzie
9 GoodGymers are going