Last night we made a return to the garden of the Highfield Unit after a 2 year hiatus. The Highfield is the young people's mental health in-patient unit at Warneford Hospital. Some of the garden has recently been redesigned into a much more inviting space, which was lovely to see.

The garden is divided into 3 sections, so we divided into a trio of teams to weed, prune and lop. We weeded and pruned outside the dining room to give a clearer view of the lovely new garden design, lopped bramble and pulled up nettles in the mosaic garden, and weeded and pruned the shaded corridor space outside some of the bedrooms.

We amassed a large pile of clippings and prunings and worked up a bit of a sweat, so were grateful for the water and biscuits we were given at the end.

Welcome to GoodGym Catriona (Kitty).

If in doubt we'll figure something out!

Nevermind the real GoodGym motto of "Do Good, Get Fit", last night was all about improvising to complete the task. We had been asked to spend our evening giving the Ark-T centre garden a tidy-up, but with the promised tools nowhere to be seen we had to do some rapid re-thinking. Fortunately we all had sturdy gardening gloves, a few of us had brought along some hand tools, and we found a broom (missing it's handle, but we were in no position to be picky!), and so we were able to do a decent amount around the garden.

Lots of weeding was done in the courtyard garden, we cut down 6ft high brambles around the shed, detangled miles of bindweed, and removed ivy from the stone wall. Particular kudos goes to the hardcore GoodGymers who removed large amounts of nettles with nothing but small secateurs and sturdy gloves!

Welcome to GoodGym Sarah, and welcome to GoodGym Oxford Becky.