The beauty of simplicity
A silver medal garden at this year’s Malvern Spring Gardening Show proved that Quaker outreach can be created by beautiful colour, elegant form and subtle fragrance!

The ‘Quaker Meeting Place Garden’ was designed by Matthew Jackman and attracted a lot of favourable attention among the 90,000 visits to the show.

Peter Fishpool of Cotteridge Meeting told Eye: ‘Most readers of the Friend would have no difficulty in recognising the garden’s Quakerliness with its quiet circle slightly screened by silver birches. Around the centre there were four stone seats and a metal sculpture – as if a person was standing ministering.’

And Leicester Friend Rachel Carmichael said: ‘Visitors to the show were able to vote for their favourite show garden, so it was fun to encourage those who clearly loved the garden to be sure to register their vote – it was the day after the general election after all. We explained that Quakers don’t vote in their Business Meetings, but it was important to use their vote for this garden!’

Matthew’s garden also featured in the BBC television programme, Gardeners’ World.

Eye learns that Friends at Malvern Meeting have arranged for the garden to be relocated to a local youth centre.

Read all about it
Quaker Homeless Action’s mobile library was also winning awards last weekend. The occasion was the Branch and Mobile Libraries Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals annual ‘MobileMeet’. The Quaker library won an award for ‘making best use of resources’ and one of their volunteers, John, was highly commended for being an excellent member of staff. John couldn’t be at the event as he was in hospital. Eye wishes him a speedy recovery.

Record-equaller
Mike Glover tells Eye that Huddersfield Meeting can equal Guildford in the candidate stakes (Eye, 7 May) as Elisabeth Wilson stood as the Liberal Democrats candidate for Halifax and Paul Cooney stood as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate for Huddersfield.

A cheery song
European and Middle East Young Friends went the extra mile to make sure that their Spring gathering epistle was heard widely – they recorded themselves singing it! Visit http://tinyurl.com/emeyf10 to read and hear it.

Ashgrove memories
Our 30 April cover reminded Barbara Crawford of visiting Ashgrove in 2000 and of a visit organised by Poole overseers on the afternoon of Saturday 19 September, 1981 to scatter the ashes of Claude Fudge as he had wished. This is what she wrote at the time:

At Ashgrove Burial Ground

Slipping down the grass of a steep hill;
glimpsing a hare in flight ahead;
seeing a rabbit, dying of a bird bite,
on the turf;
poring over a badger sett behind tall weeds;
while others wound through the great trees
of Cranborne Chase,
we came to the combe.

The gate was closed by nettles
And the elders climbed barbed wire
To chop a path to the stone:
‘This land was given in 1700
for a Quaker burial ground.’

We stood then, quiet for Claude,
An old man and a baby
And the rest of us
Who knew the tall kind carpenter.
One by one we scattered his ashes
Like seed on the ground
For the elderberries and the bees.

‘Because I have loved this life,
I know I shall love death as well.’