To all Hardy Plant Community Group members - an important message from the Admin.

We started this Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/hardyplantcommunity) at the beginning of lockdown with the aim of providing a friendly, supportive, online community where everyone - not just Hardy Plant Society members - could share their love of their gardens and plants. It has proved to be very successful – more than we dared hope - we now have over 800 members and have enjoyed lots of lovely posts and photos from you over the last few months.

As lockdown is easing, we now feel that it is the right time to extend the scope of the Group to cover all aspects of gardening and plants, including their impact on wildlife, the environment, and our health and wellbeing, and the challenges of climate change and increasing biodiversity. We also want the Group to reflect the many different ways people live and garden today, whether they have a large or small garden, a courtyard or allotment or just a couple of pots on a balcony.

We know too that there are a lot of different gardening groups, organisations and events out there and we’d like to develop the Group as a space where everyone can share what is happening in their local area and more widely – a one stop shop for all things garden.

We do hope that hardy planters will continue to use their expertise to support the wider gardening community and that we will be able to reach new people, some of whom may only have come to gardening through lockdown.

And last but not least, we’ll be renaming the Group and our Instagram page to reflect the future direction - ‘The Gardening Bubble’.

Thank you for all your support so far,

Diane and Lorraine