Tuesday 30 August 2011

time flies when you are having fun...

I knew it was a while since I had blogged but didn't realise it had been that long! In my defence we have had a short summer break after the second tools session - but Bridget and I have been busy behind the scenes also planning the second part of our collections sessions - where we will be working with different areas of the museum and looking at how we can integrate the gardening collections in these different areas. To whit Bridget has been meeting with the various groups and looking at different options - and they all seem really fun! Successful planning meetings with Learning, Skills for the Future, Front of House, Gardeners and Collections all under our belt. The work that will come out of this is really varied and will really show off the gardening collections to their full potential.

We are looking at developing a new foundation level learning session related to the gardens and the gardening collections - matching images from seed pockets to real plants grown in the garden, using scales to weigh out seeds and sorting big and small flower pots. All very basic stuff but great to be including real collections for these very young visitors.

The Skills for the Future gardeners and our gardening volunteers are really getting their teeth into our seed catalogues and are planning next year's planting using approriate plants identified from the catalogues of the correct periods for our different gardens.

This morning we had a great session with our collections volunteers and have decided to concentrate their efforts this winter on the "Taylor's Collection"; a set of material from a seedmerchants shop and warehouse in King's Lynn. The collection needs some work on the documentation. We also aim to photograph it in its entirety and add all these photographs to our catalogue so they can be seen on the internet. This is all in preparation for the potential re-display of our current seed merchants shop and the production of a temporary exhibition highlighting the gardening collections. It is great to see volunteers become more involved in the project and I am really looking forward to working with them on this over the next few months. I think it will be really beneficial for them to see a project through from inception through to completion and for the team to see some of the more public sides of collecting work, as we plan to work together on the exhibition too.

I am shortly off on holiday myself - so another short break will follow - but I'll be back at the end of September to record the next stages of the Fellowship!