Celebrating World Refugee Day
It was our pleasure to join O’s Refugee Aid Team and others on an aid convoy on World Refugee Day in northern France on 20 June. Lemon Tree Trust donated sleeping bags, basketball hoops and balls, phone chargers and seed packets to specialist teams working directly with displaced people living in temporary camps in Calais and Dunkirk.
The trip also gave us the opportunity to visit Secours Catholique‘s refugee day centre in Calais. We are working on plans to relocate our 2018 RHS Chelsea Flower Show Garden to the centre, with the help of garden designer Tom Massey, Richard Curle at Landscape Associates, as well as O’s Refugee Aid Team’s Onjali Rauf and Caroline Cottet and the brilliant team from Secours Catholique. It’s all very exciting! Watch this space for more news on this collaboration…
Pictured: The teams from O’s Refugee Aid Team, Lemon Tree Trust, Landscape Associates Ltd, Tom Massey Studio & Secours Catholique on a recent visit to northern France on World Refugee Day.
LTT activities extend into Refugee Week
Thanks to celebrated children’s author Onjali Rauf (Boy at the Back of the Class, The Night Bus Hero), O’s Refugee Aid Team and VIP Reading, we were able to extend our support beyond World Refugee Day.
VIP Reading – which provides parents and educators with high-quality educational resources and carefully selected books – included our family gardening activity sheets, sticker sheets, recipe cards and your donated seed packets in their special book boxes for Refugee Week.
About World Refugee Day and Refugee Week
World Refugee Day has been designated by the United Nations as a way to honour refugees around the globe. Together we celebrate the strength and courage of people who have been forced to flee their home and country to escape conflict or persecution.
Linked to this day is Refugee Week, an umbrella week-long festival in the UK. celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. 2022’s theme was ‘Healing’, which sought to highlight community, mutual care and the human ability to start again.
Want to help change conversations around around forcibly displaced people and support our work?
We are regularly asked by people around the world about how they can support refugees and asylum seekers, in addition to our own gardening activities. We are incredibly grateful for your support! 💚
Many thanks to Megan Davis at Perennial Gatherings for her generous donation this May, the latest in a series of kind contributions to Lemon Tree Trust over the years. Perennial Gatherings is a Vancouver-based floral studio and social enterprise, specialising in thoughtfully curated arrangements made with locally grown, seasonal blooms. Profits from floral sales are … Continued
Each month, our teams visit home gardens across nine camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to select a Garden of the Month winner. This April, we are delighted to celebrate nine gardeners whose creativity, commitment and passion for growing have transformed the spaces around their home shelters. Why the award matters In camps where … Continued
This spring, Othman Qewas, our Hêvî Community Garden manager, has been visiting schools in Gawilan camp, distributing tree and flower seedlings to children and introducing Lemon Tree Trust’s work to a new generation of young growers. Othman visited all five primary schools in Gawilan camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, reaching 124 pupils. At … Continued