Floral Fest is Back for 2023
On Saturday 24th June, celebrity gardener, Charlie Dimmock, Coolings Garden Centre and Your Bromley picked a winner in these categories:
• most creative – winner Poverest Primary School
• best use of colour – winner Darrick Wood Junior School
• best horticultural display – winner Balgowan Primary School
• best use of theme – winner Pickhurst Academy
You can vote for your favourite too with the People’s Choice vote below, open until the 30th of June.
Pickhurst Academy the ARP
WINNER BEST USE OF THEME
At Pickhurst Academy all children are valued and respected. Our Core Values are ‘Be Pickhurst’
Proud, Inquisitive, Confident, Kind, Healthy, Understanding,
Respectful, Successful, Trustworthy
The children from our Additionally Resourced Provision worked together to decorate and fill the wooden planter:
Rose – classic and instantly recognisable, flowering throughout summer as do our children given the right opportunities to achieve and aspire to reach their dreams.
The variety is called ‘Let’s Celebrate’ with striking, striped pink-white flowers with a light fragrance. It represents our children and our differences, all should be celebrated for who they are!
The tall stems of the ‘Ragged Robins’ represent working towards high achievement with resilience. They are wildlife friendly and show kindness.
The Lemon Pelargonium has been added to show how we use many of our senses in our learning – sight, smell, taste, touch
Ground cover planting represents how the school supports and encourages our children to achieve their core values -Marigolds, purple and blue Lobelia with mixed patio plants in shades of blue, reds/pinks and yellows
The picket fence represents the nine core values both in name and colour, also protection and strength to be confident.
On starting at Pickhurst the children are allocated one of four “houses”. Children collect house points for good work, the house that collects the most points is announced at a weekly celebration assembly. The canes represent the “house” colours and the flag is a copy of the Pickhurst Passport, owned by each child showing achievement in attaining the school core values.
Clare House School
Our mural behind our planter represents the core values of the school. Designed and painted by our Head Boy, Head Girl and Deputy Head Boy and Deputy Head Girl. The team thought hard about drawings which could represent each of the Clare House Core Values. The colours represented throughout the planter and plants are reflective of the four houses which we have within the school. Red represents Stanley House, Yellow represents Overbury House, Blue represents Wickham House and Green represents Oakwood House. The children also painted the planter the Clare House School colours to further represent the school.
Alexandra Junior School
HIGHLY COMMENDED BEST HORTICULTURAL DISPLAY
Thinking, Learning, Caring
Our values are represented by the oak seedling in the middle of our planter. As it grows it will learn to adjust to the weather and climate changes. This represents how we love to learn all the time at AJS. The vegetables and brightly coloured flowers show that we love thinking about and caring for one another.
We need to know what are the best conditions for these annuals to flourish in. All the vegetables were started inside the classroom. We had researched and thought about how we could best care for them and learnt from our mistakes, such as putting them outside too early when it was too cold.
This planter will hopefully flourish because we have thought about, learnt about and cared about the plants in it.
Green Street Green
Our school values are that we should be “safe, respectful, ready, responsible, creative, resilient, independent, kind, curious and motivated.”
Our planter this year includes plants that we have grown from seeds (the calendula and poppies) the plants we have bought because they are bright and colourful, and the plants we have “rescued” because they were damaged and not looked after well. We think this mix demonstrates our school values because we have plants which are safe to have in gardens for children and pets, we have been respectful of our environment by choosing plants that are good for bees and nature. The plants we rescued may not be the best looking ones, but they have been watered and cared for and not thrown away. They have had a new chance to grow and to thrive. The potentilla will grow too big for the planter, but we have found a new spot for it in our grounds and that’s what our school is all about. Making everyone feel safe and looked after so we can all do well.
The Highway Primary School
At the Highway, we provide good role models who inspire through the love of learning to ensure that every child feels listened to, supported and free to build happy memories in a place where learning is enjoyable and education is valued.
The Highway takes pride in helping children to grow into the person they want to be and achieve their goals.
Our flowers represent the colours of our rainbow, but instead of placing them in lines, we wanted to show them mixed together, so that each colour has an equal role to play and is as important as any other, the same way that we see everyone at The Highway.
We have included images of flowers which represent our values, along with quotes from children with their thoughts on what the values mean to them. For ‘Courage’ we have the Sunflower, ‘Kindness’ we have Bluebells, and Lily of the Valley for ‘Inclusion & Equality’ The Iris represents ‘Respect’ and Gladiolus for ‘Resilience’
St Philomenas
At St Philomena’s, our school vision is to “Share the Love of God, Every Day in Everything We Learn, Do, and Say,” guided by the values of empower, inspire, and challenge. The planter’s natural base colour represents our high regard for nature and our commitment to empower children to love and care for the natural world. We have installed small mirrors with self-affirmation to represent how we share God’s love by loving ourselves.
Symbols surround the planter that resonate with our values. The sun represents the warmth of divine love that inspires us daily. It represents how we empower children to participate fully in society and embrace their personal responsibility to care for our world. The image of an open book reflects our thirst for knowledge and how we inspire and challenge our children to fulfil their potential through enriched learning opportunities. The soaring butterfly symbolises the transformative power of challenges we embrace, emerging stronger and more resilient. The intertwined hands signify support and unity among our parish and school community to promote Catholic values. The hearts represent our creative and inspiring curriculum which aims to instil a lifelong love of learning. The rainbow represent how we share God’s love by embracing unity and diversity.
We chose to plant white Petunias and Argyranthemum to symbolise our spirituality and the beauty that flourishes when we Share the Love of God. We planted green beans to represent responsible stewardship of the Earth, reflecting our gratitude for nature’s abundance and our commitment to nurturing God’s creation through sustainable practices. Each element of the design reflects our commitment to sharing the love of God in everything we learn, do and say.
Bickley Primary School
HIGHLY COMMENDED BEST USE OF COLOUR
Bickley’s values are encompassed by the moto ‘All different, All equal, all achieve’.
In order represent this we have created a planter with three levels. Each level has a different type of plant in different colours and sizes. This represents our diversity of people and their talents. The first level has large plants, The second level has smaller plants, eg pansies, the third level has trailing plants, such as ivy which will hang over the edge.
Each row is planted so the flowers are all equal in height and equally spaced apart. This represents the equality of all people, regardless of their background or circumstances.
This is echoed in the nautical paint scheme – the planter is decorated like the sea with fish the children have drawn and designed.
The planter will be put in Bromley town centre. Here, it will be seen by many people. This will represent the idea that everyone has the potential to achieve great things that can be seen by many!
Raglan Primary School
Our school values are
· Kind
· Ready
· Safe
· Resilient
· Confident
· Independent
We have planted the following herbs and plants to reflect these.
· Lavender as it is kind, its scent can help with calmness and sleep
· Marjoram as it is ready, ready to eat.
· Thyme as it is safe, safe to eat.
· Nasturtium as it is resilient. It contains high levels of vitamin C and can help fight infection.
· Trailing lobelia in yellow and blue to represent confidence. Blue and yellow are our school colours and it represents our children and the confidence that they have.
· Mint for independence. Mint thrives in most soils and can spread. Mint is also nutritional and it’s leave contain vitamin A, C and B and have anti-bacterial properties.
We are an Eco school and use herbs and plants like these as sensory gardens in our outdoor areas.
La Fontaine Academy
Diversity and inclusion is at the heart of everything we do at La Fontaine Academy. We believe we all must work together in order to succeed. Our school motto, ‘Aiming Higher, together’ reflects this. We have decided to decorate our planter with a variety of flowers to represent the importance of diversity and to show how diversity is beautiful.
Hayes Primary School
Hayes Primary School’s values are:
Excellence
Respect
Responsibility
Community
Compassion
Resilience
As that’s quite a lot to cram into a planter, we have chosen three to represent: Community, Responsibility and Resilience.
Community:
Our plants have been grown by our school community – some seeds sown in gardening club and other plants like the marigolds donated by my dad! We have tried to represent our local community in the decoration of the planter including people in the community who mean a lot to us.
Responsibility
We garden responsibly at our gardening club every Tuesday, we are totally organic and choose plants that help the wildlife around us, all the plants we have chosen are good for pollinators and will benefit our environment by helping to keep bees happy!
Resilience
We have (we hope!) chosen resilient plants that will cope with dry weather and drought so that we don’t have to water too frequently. This in turn helps the environment. We are resilient at gardening club too – we bounce back when things don’t go according to plan – which is more often than you’d think!
Darrick Wood Infant & Nursery Academy
Darrick Wood is a small nurturing school. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive and resilient school that promotes the difference of each child. Our school moto is Respect, we aim to teach the children about respecting themselves, respecting others and respecting the environment. We have used this as a base for our design and the plants we have chosen. Children were invited to bring in their favourite plant or flower to add to the whole school effort to show that here at Darrick Wood we are respectful to our friends and we are all different, similar to the plants all being different and getting along well in the planter. Each child has had an input onto the design, decorating the individual animals and leaves and also discussing what respect means to us as a class, and a school. Our school community encourages everyone to be themselves, have respect for themselves and to respect other people and the world around them. This is reflected in the planter being created by the school community and the plants being donated after being lovingly grown at home or chosen as someone’s favourite.
Midfield Primary School
‘At Midfield Primary we are keen gardeners and have our own Eco Garden where we plant, conserve water and spend time enjoying nature. Last term we also introduced some hives so we now also keep bees in an apiary making us young apiarists! We have really enjoyed learning about the links between the bees, pollination and keeping the cycle of life turning.
Our planter is painted colourfully to complement the rainbow within our school logo. We have hand painted vines creeping up the sides and detailed honey combs for the bees to be busy inside.
Our School values: Ambition, Collaboration, Fairness and Respect are clearly displayed for all to see and are reflected in our planter.
Our ambition was to make our display attractive to Bees and edible with Herbs & Strawberries.
(we’ve got a small bay tree, strawberry plants, basil, rosemary, lettuce, marigolds and geraniums)
We collaboratively painted the planter in small groups at break and lunchtime.
We wanted to do this to show our respect to nature and each other.
Ultimately we all want to contribute to a fair world where sustainability is embedded for future generations.’
Perry Hall
At Perry Hall, our school values are resilience, being reflective, being respectful, being determined, courageous and being kind. After a long discussion with the ECO committee, we have decided that the theme for our planter should be ‘The Wizard of Oz’. The characters in the story show all of these traits to overcome obstacles in their journeys. The cowardly lion overcomes his fears and shows courage and being determined. The tin man longs for a heart and shows kindness, the scarecrow shows resilience and being reflective and Dorothy shows respect for the characters she meets on her journey. Our planter will have items from these characters hidden within the flowers. The flowers and plants within the planter will represent our school values and we have researched these to ensure all links are made. We had a wonderful time with this competition and hope you all enjoy looking at our planter.
Scotts Park Primary School
At Scotts Park all of the pupils and staff undertake every task, activity and challenge with ‘Positivity’
They are encouraged to have ‘Pride’ in their effort and achievements
And ‘Perseverance’ in the face of difficulties.
Our planter therefore represents our values and that our pupils are the heart of everything we do!
Red Hill
Our Red Hill planter has been filled with red plants to represent our school name. We have taken our school value ‘Building Bright Futures’ and have decorated the planter with pictures of children’s drawings showing what they would like to be when they grow up. These are hanging on a trellis which has been buried inside the planter.
Alexandra Infant School
Alexandra Infant School’s values are Achieve, Inspire, Succeed. Our planter is decorated with artwork by the children of Year Two, who reflected on their three years at the school and drew things that represented their achievements and successes, or sources of inspiration. We chose a plant design because AIS helps children to grow.
Our flowers are in the school colours of red and white, and the different sizes and stages of growth represent the three years of children – from tiny seedlings, like our reception classes, to flowers climbing up out of the planter, ready to go somewhere new, just as Year Two is getting ready to leave for the junior school.
The flowers were cared for and planted by the school gardening club.
Burnt Ash Primary School
The Burnt Ash Primary planter theme is butterflies.
Our planter is painted and decorated with beautiful butterflies to celebrate the release of 30 butterflies by our Nursery class.
The planting supports butterflies in the wild, taking inspiration from the community garden at Brook Lane, which the school supports.
St Mark's CE Primary School
We chose to include red and gold coloured flowers to represent the colours of St Mark’s school. The red dahlia is the centre point, while around it are the beginnings of four sunflowers seedlings, whose growth and eventual bloom will represent the children of our school as they grow and flourish. Amongst the yellow trailing flowers are two tomato plants, also in their early stages, to represent education as a form of nourishment. The planter itself is decorated to remind us of the school values, taken from Colossians 3 12-17: “Clothe yourselves with Love”. From this Bible passage, we have the following school values: Love, Kindness, Forgiveness, Patience, Thankfulness, Wisdom, Humility, Compassion. These values are shared throughout our school on posters designed by the children using rainbow colours, which is why we have used rainbow colours for the planter.
Darrick Wood Junior School
WINNER BEST USE OF COLOUR
This years’ entry we hope will be full of colour, fun and demonstrate the heart of what it means to be a pupil at Darrick Wood Junior School. We want it to reflect our bright talented youngsters and the differences they bring to our community. (Demonstrated by our hot air balloons), we aim high and consider the journey our children take at Darrick Wood Junior School. Learning should last a lifetime and along with respect, kindness and honesty, each year is an important step towards being a valued citizen of our school and the wider community.
A group of our Year 4 children spent time thinking about their values and adding their thoughts and what they were proud of to the clouds on our display.
We all strive to ensure that our values are evident in everything that we do and achieve individually and collectively as a school family. Just like the plants in our trough, they live and grow as individual specimens, but as a display they work together for a common goal, complimenting and bringing out the best in other like our friends at school. Everyone matters here.
St James RC Primary School
The inspiration for the design of our planter this year was taken from a meeting of 21 of our school members spread across all seven classes at St. James’. The children reflected upon our ‘School Values’ and how they might best be interpreted. We have settled upon a shelf of books, each of a different colour, this colour will then be continued through into the actual plantings shown in our wooden trough. Our rainbow of books will each pick out one of our core values, for example, Kindness/Respect/Courtesy/Diversity/Honesty. The children are very excited to be able to share with our local community, the behaviours that are central to life at St.James’.
Poverest Primary School
WINNER MOST CREATIVE
In September each year, every class at Poverest Primary School (including Reception and the Additionally Resourced Provision) creates their own Class Charter, which details what rules the pupils want followed in their class. Across the school, the main themes featured are respect for each other’s feelings and opinions, helping each other, learning resilience, and looking after the environment within our school and the world.
Our planter this year shows these values by including plants grown and nurtured by pupils for bees and pollinating insects, vegetable plants grown by pupils to signify the healthy eating we encourage, Sunflowers (grown by pupils) to show kindness and respect and a central miniature rose to show friendship. The diversity of plants (size, type and colours) represents the diverse nature of our school community and how everyone can thrive given the support they need.
Our school motto is ‘Learn together, Grow together, Succeed together’ depicted by the watering can ‘watering the flowers’ with our central message.
All artwork included was created by our pupils from a variety of age groups, backgrounds, and abilities.
Blenheim Primary School
HIGHLY COMMENDED BEST USE OF THEME
At Blenheim Primary School we work hard to be a happy, safe place by following our school values.
We behave with Integrity . We are Resilient. We strive for Excellence.
Our school council ran a competition to design this year’s planter and of the 38 entries, we have taken a bit of each entry! We’ve used colour to represent the values both in the décor of the planter and the planting itself. You’re in for a real treat! Pictures are better than words!
Mead Road Infants School
At Mead Road Infant School our core values are pride, curiosity and determination and they underpin everything we do at Mead Road Infant School. We are very proud of our school and community, so we wanted to create a planter that was a representation of our school building. The flowers represent the flower beds at the front of our school. Our Eco Council have planted and decorated our planter and continue to work hard to raise the profile of looking after our local environment.
Ravensworth Primary School
Our planter represents our big values and our core values, which we believe help to make a well rounded citizen, preparing children for the future. The children have ensured that their messages are conveyed through their statement boards on the side of the box, their postcards to the future (scattered throughout) and the plant colours that represent the emotion linked to our values. The values signpost reminds us that sometimes we have to strive towards success and achieving this can sometimes be a journey. The values are the lifeblood of our school and they represent the care taken to create the planter and on a wider scale, to help support our environment.
Elmstead Wood Primary School
Our school values are Ambition, Collaboration, Fairness and Respect. As a backdrop to our planter, we have used the story which we are currently learning, Jack and the Beanstalk. The children were very ambitious (just like Jack) and worked hard to grow the “tallest beans in the world” and we selected the tallest of the class to be in the planter. We worked collaboratively to paint and decorate the planter and plant it with the selected flowers. As a class, we spoke about being respectful and recorded statements of how we can be respectful to others and recorded these ideas onto the raindrops that have fallen from the clouds in the story. Together we also discussed whether it was fair that Jack stole from the beanstalk and agreed that he should share the riches (in this case flowers) with the Giant. The plants were selected based on their colours (focusing primarily on blues and purples for the sky and white for the clouds). Some of these plants were also selected so that they can be replanted into our garden in school which would be fair because we can share them with our parents and peers in the future. We really enjoyed making this planter together and hope that others will enjoy it too.
Churchfields Primary School
HIGHLY COMMENDED MOST CREATIVE
We have decorated the planter along the theme of our school value Aspiration, Citizenship and Excellence ( ACE).
The planter represents our school community and the plants in it are us, the children.
The tall plants, short plants, plants with different colour flowers and foliage in the planter shows how we respect and embrace differences. This value of diversity is also shown in our different coloured and sized fingerprints decorating our planter. Moreover, the plants in our planter not only have their origins from a variety of places such as the UK, Africa, Asia, America, New Zealand and Europe just like the children in our school but also appeal to the different senses such as sight, smell, taste and touch.
The plants are holding a ladder with a star to represent the way we children dream big and are proud to do our best. In Churchfields, we listen and work well with others and this is depicted by plants facing each other and enjoying each other’s company. In addition, plants are holding a globe to show our caring nature for each other, our community and our world.
Finally, plants are playing board games, skipping and reading in groups which symbolises how in our school we are kind to each other and thereby develop healthy and positive friendships.
These are a realistic representation of what happens in our school every day.
Charlie, Ava, Ellie, Connie, Erin, Grace, Eliza, Alfie, Anaia, Emily and Maya
Churchfields Primary School
Balgowan Primary School
WINNER BEST HORTICULTURAL DISPLAY
For our school’s flower display, our students showcased their creativity and embodiment of school values with a truly spectacular display. They crafted a scene of a rainbow arcing through a bright sky speckled with fluffy clouds. This wasn’t just any rainbow, though. Each color was represented by a specific type of flower, thoughtfully chosen to symbolize the values our school holds dear: friendship, perseverance, kindness, acceptance, and hard work. On a closer inspection you will be delighted to find inspirational quotes nestled within the clouds, all handwritten by our students. This beautiful blend of horticulture and thoughtful symbolism exemplified our school community’s dedication to fostering an environment where these values are at the forefront of our students’ education and development. We couldn’t be more proud of the end result, a radiant visual example of our shared principles.
