Exeter Community Garden
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    • Soups & Starters
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    • Desserts & Sweets
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    • Flapjack
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  • Covid-19 Guidance
  • Our Constitution
Exeter Community Garden
  • Home
  • Committee & Other News
  • Poems
  • Art at the Garden
  • Brown Hairstreak
  • New pond area
  • Support Us
  • Contact Us
  • Your comments
  • Our Crops
    • The Orchard
    • Our Fruit
    • Other fruit
    • The Raised Beds
    • Top Polytunnel
  • Our Recent Videos
  • Orchard planting
  • Photographs
    • The Early Years
    • Social Gardening
    • Wildlife
    • Our harvests and produce
    • The Weather
  • Our Recipes
  • Soups and Starters
    • Soups & Starters
  • Main Courses
    • Main courses
  • Desserts & Sweets
    • Desserts & Sweets
  • Other Recipes
    • Flapjack
  • Health and Safety Policy
  • Covid-19 Guidance
  • Our Constitution

Your 2024 - 2025 committee

Paul cleave

margarette parlett

adrian berryman

Chair

Responsible for chairing committee meetings liaising, with the University and fuelling garden activities with delicious homemade food.

adrian berryman

margarette parlett

adrian berryman

Secretary

 Organises meetings, maintains membership records and helps with general administration. 

margarette parlett

margarette parlett

margarette parlett

Treasurer

 Maintains financial records, identifies potential grants and other financial sources of funds. 

norrie blackeby

margarette parlett

margarette parlett

Garden Ambassador

Was instrumental in setting up the garden and getting onto a sound financial footing, continues to promote and take an interest in the garden

amy blakemore

david barker-hahlo

jayne cooksley

Student representative

Liaises between the garden and Students' Guild, the various societies and students in general.

jayne cooksley

david barker-hahlo

jayne cooksley

Staff representative.

Liaises between the staff at the University and the Garden.

philippa davies

david barker-hahlo

david barker-hahlo

Community representative

Promotes the garden to the wider local community

david barker-hahlo

david barker-hahlo

david barker-hahlo

Ex officio committee member

summer party

Summer Party


We plan to have a Sumer Party at the Garden on

Saturday 7th June from 10.00am

This will be at our normal morning session and carry on over lunch.

Food and drink will be on a 'Bring and Share' basis.

We look forward to seeing you.


For those who can't manage the Saturday event, we'll have an informal gathering on 

Wednesday 4th June from 3.00pm 

possibly with a bit a gardening as well.

Rare, elusive butterfly spotted at Exeter Community Garden

the brown hairstreak butterfly

After spending many hours on my hands and knees rummaging through the grass, staring at tree trunks and shaking branches in search of bugs for my Masters dissertation, I decided that I wanted to do it all over again…and I knew exactly where! Nestled away at the top of the university grounds, hidden by its dense hedgerows, lies the Exeter Community Garden – a communal garden made up of individuals from the community, along with students and staff at the University of Exeter. Here, the gate is always open. Whether you want to eat your lunch listening to the birds chirp, go on a ladybird hunt, have a moment of mindfulness, or grow produce. The space is yours, to find your own special moment of joy in.

In Exeter, you treasure the days when the sun finally decides to make an appearance. One such day, while everyone was gardening, I was enjoying looking for bugs in the long grass, when one crawled right onto my arm, transporting me back to the traditional meadows of my childhood village. We sat and bonded for a while, enjoying the sun. It was then that I decided I wanted to delve deeper into the hidden life of the garden.

A beautifully sunny week in early September marked the beginning of my garden adventures. After a few hours sat under the medlar tree photographing beetles, bugs and spiders in the grass, I moved onto something a little bigger – butterflies. The weather was perfect for spotting some butterflies soaking up the sun, I thought. I was right! Within the first ten minutes, I had already seen around six meadow browns and large whites, gracefully dancing in their delicate manner. Deep in the middle of the vegetable garden, I saw another flash of orange come closer to me as it landed. Another meadow brown? It was clearly enjoying soaking up the sun, and stayed perfectly still for a little over a minute, revealing itself as one of the UK’s most elusive butterflies – the brown hairstreak.

Brown Hairstreaks are ‘nationally scarce’, having fallen victim of declining ash tree populations and drastic declines in hedgerows. Despite this, we are lucky enough, here in Devon, to have a stronghold of the UK’s population of these elusive animals. The brown hairstreak begins its life in the autumn, as an egg, found exclusively on young shoots of blackthorn trees – the exact place that brown hairstreak eggs were found at the garden a couple of months after my sighting. As spring arises, it begins munching the blackthorn leaves, in its new bright green caterpillar form, fattening up, ready for a short spell in its penultimate form, a chrysalis. By July, it has emerged as a butterfly. Now, in its most elusive form, the brown hairstreak will spend the majority of its time high in the tree tops and within dense hedgerows, making itself incredibly difficult to spot. Adults depend on one ‘master tree’, usually an Ash tree, where they will mate and feed on aphid honeydew. If you are lucky enough to see one come out of the tree tops, you might see them feeding on pollen from hemp-agrimony, fleabane, thistles and brambles.

Protecting this species is a crucial step towards conserving biodiversity and should be at the forefront of UK conservation efforts. Exeter community garden plays a vital role in these conservation efforts and can contribute greatly towards halting the UK’s rapidly declining biodiversity. The brown hairstreak is suffering a housing crisis, due to the increasing loss of woodlands and the annual destruction of hedgerows. The community garden provides an essential habitat for this rare species, containing many mature hedgerows and plants that are critical to the hairstreak’s lifecycle. Preserving habitats like the community garden, along with planting more species that the hairstreak relies upon, can help to provide a healthy home for the brown hairstreak and contribute greatly to UK conservation efforts.

the dog's waterbowl

Memorable dates

Some of our past milestones

30th June 2011

The Garden officially opened by the Lord Mayor of Exeter.


16th November 2011

The first trees planted in the orchard - see video on 'Orchard planting'.


March 2012

The Observatory erected.


7th June 2012

The Observatory inaugurated by the Vice Chancellor, Registrar and Lord Mayor.


March 2013

The greenhouse erected.


May 2013

The cob bench formed with the help of Kevin McCabe.


March 2014

The polytunnels completed.


4th October 2014

Floella Benjamin, Chancellor, planted the mulberry tree in the orchard, variety 'Chancellor'.


November 2021

New website launched.


8th June 2022

Our 10th anniversary party. (delayed 12 months due to Covid restrictions).


10th June 2023

Hospiscare open day


2023 year

Replaced all the timber for the raised beds and new polythene membrane on both polytunnels.

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Exeter Community Garden

9 Valley Park Close, Exeter, EX4 5HJ, United Kingdom

07901 820604

Copyright © 2023 Exeter Community Garden - All Rights Reserved.

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