Green-fingered pupils from a Blackburn high school pitched in with hospital gardeners to plant £550 worth of blooms donated to hospitals charity ELHT&Me.
Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School made the floral-tastic donation to brighten up a garden used by patients, visitors and staff to reflect and remember loved ones.
Six pupils from year seven paid a visit to the Garden of Memories at Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital to see how their donation had been spent and help bed in the plants.
The visit came less than a week before Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim festival of sacrifice, which celebrates the Islamic values of duty and self-sacrifice and sees Muslims carry out charitable acts by helping others and being selfless.
The girls worked with gardeners from East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust armed with spades, gloves and trowels to plant lobelia, fuchsia and phlox as well as other blooms designed to offer a splash of colour to the quiet area.
The garden, opened virtually in October 2020, was funded by the Trust’s charity, ELHT & Me, and includes benches, a winding pathway and pergola, as well as landscaped areas and bright ornamental butterflies.
Eddie McMahon, gardening team leader, showed pupils Zubaydah Limbada, Sanaa Ibrahim and Arissa Patel how to plant lobelia in an area cut out to spell ‘NHS’. In another part of the outdoor area, Fatimah Patel, Aamina Sethi and Maya Khalid assisted gardener Steven Lloyd to brighten up a large flower bed with an array of plants.
They were also given some plants to take back to the school by Eddie and Steven to enable them to plant a piece of the garden back at Tauheedul, furthering the links between the two organisations.
Hospital Imam Fazal Hassan, a foundation trustee of Star Academies, the trust that operates multiple schools including its flagship Tauheedul Islam Girls High School, suggested the donation could benefit the garden after seeing the impact of the quiet space has had since it was introduced.
