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Wildlife-friendly food growing: the impact of Coronation Gardens for Food and Nature

As the Coronation Gardens for Food and Nature project comes to an end, we take a look at the impact on individuals, groups and communities across the UK

The Coronation Gardens for Food and Nature project has ended. This unique partnership initiative, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, ran from spring 2023 until October 2025, with one simple aim: to encourage more people to grow more food in a wildlife-friendly way.

It brought The Wildlife Trusts together with The Women’s Institute, Garden Organic and Incredible Edible to pool all our collective strengths and expertise to support people across the UK – from individuals, families and community groups, to schools, charities and prisons.

Highlights from Coronation Gardens

A very ugly pumpkin

Ruth Dennison/The Wildlife Trusts

The “Virtual Village Fete” photography competition

We wanted to bring the food growing and wildlife-friendly gardening communities across the UK together in a quirky, fun way. Badged as a “virtual village fete”, we ran a free-to-enter photography competition, inviting amateur photos into such categories as “most flamboyant insect” and “comical veg”. There were nearly 600 entries, and the winners received books from our celebrity judge, Jack Wallington.

Simple black and white drawing of a plant

The Wildlife Trusts

Supporting wildlife-friendly growing in prisons

The WI had an established relationship with women’s prisons which led to an exploration of how Coronation Gardens could contribute. Garden Organic ran a workshop for WI volunteers and prison staff on the Principles of Organic Gardening and the volunteers will be using that knowledge to work alongside women prisoners in a prison’s kitchen gardens, supporting staff, encouraging wildlife-friendly practices and being role models for the women. This will be a key part of the legacy of the project and the work in the area is expected to continue and expand, with other prisons already reaching out for support.

A group of people walking in the countryside

Tim George

Loddington Wetlands – a community comes together

The small village of Loddington, near Kettering in Northamptonshire, is an example of what is possible when a community comes together. One local philanthropist was the catalyst, encouraging landowners to dedicate plots of land along a river to join up a corridor for wildlife right through the valley. This snowballed, involving the local school and community in the creation of vegetable-growing plots and the planting of fruit trees. We used the site as a venue for our end of project celebrations.

a screenshot of a livestream with five panels and faces

But can planting carrots on a roundabout really change the world?

We dedicated one of our popular panel livestreams to the topic of Community Food Growing. The guests were Professor Tim Lang, Sheereen Chung-Blake of Future Gardeners, Pam Warhurst founder of Incredible Edible, and Dominic Taylor from Warwickshire Wildlife Trust. It was a lively discussion and can be watched on YouTube. 

Resources and outcomes

The resources and outcomes resulting from the partnership include:

New connections and stronger relationships

Each partner brought their unique experience to the project. Incredible Edible are a grassroots organisation that’s open to anyone, encouraging and supporting communities to campaign for a Right to Grow. Garden Organic are gardening experts, custodians of the Heritage Seed Library, and run workshops and events throughout the year. The WI empower and support women in a huge variety of ways through their local, federated structure, and particularly brought their campaigning, cooking and craft expertise to this project.

Other connections were made. A chance meeting with the small sensory disorder charity, SmellTaste, led to reciprocal webinars. This then sparked a relationship between Suffolk Wildlife Trust and SmellTaste, resulting in an artist-led workshop at a nature reserve to support people suffering smell and taste issues. 

All of these connections will be maintained in some form.

Digital and printed resources to help everyone to grow food in a wildlife-friendly way

Schools pack – support and information on what to grow with pupils, how to get started, what to do with the produce, sample budgets, a glossary and even a term-time calendar.

Gardening in Small Spaces – a booklet available in print or download for everyone, whether you have a balcony, windowbox, or small concrete yard.

The Prisons Support pack – a simple, photocopiable workbook for prisoners in kitchen gardens to record their work and help them talk about their experiences for future employment and training.

Website resources – the MyCoronationGarden.org website will continue to house seasonal recipes, all the available downloads, and a variety of blogs on topics from saving seeds to planting trees.

Foreground of colourful flowers with people, shed and wheelbarrow in distance

A Barlow/The Wildlife Trusts

Learnings

The Community Food Growing Report - independently researched and written by Grounded Insight Ltd

Recommendations from the Community Food Growing Report

For Coronation Gardens partners and VCSE organisations 

  • Review the role of community food growing in relevant strategies and specify its role in delivering organisational objectives 
  • Seek new and wider partnerships across the range of topics and impacts that community food growing intersects with
  • Follow the principles of community organising in community food growing projects 
  • Grow and connect existing initiatives which embrace community activism and all types of volunteering 
  • Continue to develop ways to support existing and potential community food growing project leads. 

 Funders of community food growing and community-led activism 

  • Consider providing funding for the community food growing project lead roles
  • Community food growing crosses many agendas and organisations which funders can help to create connections between. 

 National government and policymakers 

  • Community food growing cuts across different government departments and agendas, including health, environment and food, volunteering, neighbourhood and democratic renewal. It should be prioritised and included across departmental strategies and priorities across England, Scotland and Wales.   

 For the Westminster government  

  • Provide powers for local authorities, in particular planning departments, to facilitate the availability of land for community food growing, and give a Right to Grow legislative backing
  • Integrate community food growing into Defra’s developing thinking on the Food Strategy 
  • Champion the local social infrastructure for volunteering and community activism
  • Champion community food growing within community-led version of the ‘neighbourhood health service’. 

 Local government and local health systems  

  • Local councillors should pass a motion for the community’s Right to Grow 
  • Strategic authorities can recognise and promote community food growing in their forthcoming Spatial Development Strategies 
  • Integrated Care Systems can recognise and support community food growing in social and green prescribing activities
  • Parks and open spaces departments can champion community food growing
  • Local Nature Partnerships and Local Food Partnerships can offer support and connections for community food growing projects. 

 Current and future community food growing project leads: the change-makers 

  • Seek forgiveness rather than permission for taking changing the world into your own hands. 

Download the full report from the website. 

Evaluation Report – an independent evaluation by Meaningful Measures Ltd of the overall effectiveness of the project

Recommendations from the project evaluation

  1. Strengthen resourcing and infrastructure for future projects involving partners. Adequate funding, and equitable distribution of resources, greater involvement in decision-making, and dedicated project management staff within the organisation are essential to avoid over-reliance on goodwill, working for free, creating tension and limiting the scale of the work. Connections to funding from commercial businesses may be useful for further more sustainable development.
  2. Invest in follow-up and longitudinal data collection. Systematic monitoring of pledgers over time, with adequate baseline and follow-up data collection time points was needed. YEO and prison projects would provide stronger evidence of sustained behaviour change and well-being impact. However, these are large projects in themselves and each warrant a separate evaluation.  
  3. Expand the prison strand. This piece of work seems to be a tantalising legacy of the Coronation Gardens project which could result in real societal and environmental benefits. The pilot work established by the good-willed partners needs to be supported by finding further funding to extend and embed horticultural interventions across prisons, linking to employability frameworks.
  4. Deepen education engagement. Further funding could be sought to provide schools with the resources they are asking for (seeds, tools, training) and to integrate gardening into curricula to maximise benefits for skills and well-being. Connections to pre-existing community food growing projects, e.g. Nextdoor Nature from The Wildlife Trusts, could be aligned to this work.
  5. Ensure inclusivity and accessibility. Future projects should ensure that participants reflect diverse communities and nations, addressing feedback about inclusivity. Make sure any future projects actively recruit people from wider communities who may not already be interested in nature and food growing. 

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