We use our grounds for practical learning about the seed-to-seed cycle. We plant willow wherever it will grow and harvest it for projects around the school and to make basket with in design technology. In Spring, the children gather the daffodils they planted in the previous Autumn to honour their mothers for Mothering Sunday. They have earned this right by collecting the bulbs on shopping trips to the local garden centre, using them for maths work and then planting them. Each child learns how to pick responsibly, and what is safe to touch and which plants are best left alone.

We feel It is important to offer the children the environment where they can make these distinctions, not to attempt to remove everything that appears to be harmful, but to show the children how to recognise plants and their properties. We have planted traditional healing plants such as willow, comfrey and feverfew and wherever the stinging nettle grows, the soothing dock leaf is nearby.

Dandelions and daisies spread across the field in a carpet of white and yellow - an opportunity to estimate how any in a given area for maths, to observe how they open and close with the heat and cool of the day for science, to collect for art and daisy chains, to enjoy what many gardeners might dismiss as a troublesome weed.