Press Releases 6th October 2023
Volunteer Award for St Asaph Cathedral Heritage Gardeners
Volunteer Award for St Asaph Cathedral Heritage Gardeners
Volunteer gardeners who created a medieval garden in the grounds of St Asaph Cathedral have been rewarded for their hard work.
The team has come joint first in Wales in The British Museum and the Marsh Charitable Trust 2022 volunteer awards. The ‘Volunteers for Museum Learning’ award recognises the hugely important contribution that volunteers make to help museums engage with their visitors.
The garden was created as part of St Asaph Cathedral’s National Lottery Heritage Fund Project which aimed to illustrate more of the Cathedral’s history, engage local people and improve wellbeing. The gardeners have been meeting every Wednesday morning since May 2021 to tend the space outside the Cathedral which includes a Medieval physic and meditation garden, a Tudor herbs and strewing section and a Victorian potager. The garden has enabled the Cathedral to tell more of its medieval story, given visitors the opportunity to learn about the ancient uses of herbs and provided a quiet and contemplative space for pilgrims, tourists and local people.
The Administration and Business Officer for St Asaph Cathedral, Jackie Feak said: “The garden is a wonderful addition to this ancient building. It has created more opportunities for us to engage with local schools and families and has made the formal and informal offer of the Cathedral more diverse and appealing.
“Visitors now stay longer at the Cathedral and can talk to passionate and enthusiastic volunteers about the gardens. The information leaflet on the types of plants and herbs developed by the volunteers, provides a useful guide for visitors.
“The activities run by the gardeners have also increased the use of the Cathedral within the local community, improved well-being and engaged with more diverse audiences. Many families who commented, said the Cathedral was not a place they would have thought to visit before.”
St Asaph Cathedral heritage garden was designed and planted in the summer of 2021, but it was throughout 2022 that the garden came to life.
As part of the submission for the award, one of the volunteer gardens said: “It has been a wonderful experience being a volunteer at St Asaph Cathedral heritage gardens. Getting together as a group was the first thing I became involved in post covid. It was so beneficial being in the company of other like-minded people after the period of social isolation that we had all experienced. It was exciting to be part of a new concept that was to benefit both the volunteers and the wider community, from the initial planning through to planting the first plant.”
The current St Asaph Cathedral dates from the fourteenth century and was instrumental in the preservation of the Welsh language. It displays an original copy of the William Morgan Bible which dates from 1588, along with the first translation of the New Testament into Welsh dating from 1567, made by the Denbighshire scholar William Salesbury; the revision of the William Morgan Bible from 1620 made by Bishop Richard Parry – also Bishop of St Asaph, and a Book of Common Prayer from 1621 containing The Edmund Prys Psalter which allowed Psalms to be sung in Welsh in church for the first time.
The Cathedral is one of the main heritage attractions along the A55 corridor and features on the brown tourism signage from that route.
St Asaph Cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of St Asaph, one of the six Bishops of the Church in Wales, an autonomous Province of the worldwide Anglican Communion.