Who we are

Phoenix Gardeners is a group of community volunteers with an enthusiasm for making Cirencester a more vibrant place to live, work or visit by planting and maintaining tubs, hanging baskets and many community spaces around town.

How can you help?

There are many ways you can be part of enhancing Cirencester.

• Volunteering – We welcome anyone who wants to join in. You do not necessarily need green fingers, just a desire to be part of it.
• Working with the tubs – We ask our tub minders to plant and maintain their tubs by planting up in May with summer bedding and in September with bulbs and winter bedding. Then over the summer we ask that you water, deadhead and generally keep tidy once or twice a week.  Looking after the tubs can give you an individual sense of pride and allows you to manage your volunteering to suit your own time commitments, often less than half an hour a week.
• Working with the flower beds – We meet by the main flower bed in the Abbey Grounds on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month and work for about two hours.  The tasks vary from light weeding, to clearing some of the overgrown and neglected beds.  It’s your choice what you do, but this work is much communal and its fun working as part of a group. It can help you learn new skills.
• Sponsoring and Donating – Whilst the volunteer activity is very important, so is the ability to fund what we do but sponsorship of tubs and hanging baskets is an important element. Local businesses have been keen to help make the town look nice, but local individuals have also given small amounts because of the pleasure that they have had from seeing flower displays around the town.

How are we funded?

Our longest supporter has been Cirencester Town Council who gives us a grant to help buy things which we cannot grow or provide ourselves, such as bulbs.   However the bulk of our funds come from local firms sponsoring tubs and hanging baskets, from donors and our own fund raising events, such as plant stalls.