Celebrating our April Garden of the Month award winners

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 outdoor space is limited and green areas are scarce, the effort residents put into their home gardens is remarkable. The Garden of the Month award recognises that effort: the creative flair, the innovative planting ideas and the determination to fill every available corner with life and colour.

Each winner receives a special plaque to display at their shelter, a selection of seeds and a fruit tree. A sign is also placed in the winning garden for passers-by and neighbours to see, celebrating the gardener’s achievement within their community, before moving on to the next month’s winner.

Aveen Ibrahem, our operations manager in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq shares:

“Every month, our garden facilitators find gardens that stop you in your tracks with a little plot that someone has clearly poured their heart into. The Garden of the Month award is a way of saying: we see what you have built and it matters. Gardens like these deserve to be celebrated all year round, not just during our Annual Garden Competitions. They are proof of what people create when they are given the means and the encouragement to grow.”

Three gardens worth celebrating

View three of this month’s winning gardens

Maryam’s garden in Gawilan camp

Maryam has created a garden that is as well considered as it is beautiful. A pathway edged with pebbles leads through the space, with a low wall separating the main garden from a shaded seating area outside her front door. Planting varies in height throughout, creating layers of visual interest and vibrant pink roses appear across the garden, bringing colour, scent and pollinators. A cheerful, welcoming space and, for Maryam and her neighbours, a reminder of home.

Iyad‘s garden in Domiz 2 camp

Iyad has built something closer to a smallholding than an ornamental garden. Defined beds and sections are laid out with clear intention, planted with vegetables and fruit trees and enclosed by a hand-built wooden fence. This is a productive, purposeful space: one that feeds a family and strengthens food security at the most immediate level possible, grown just steps from the shelter door.

Hamou’s garden in Kabartu 1 camp

Hamou has well-established trees alongside his tented shelter with a clear purpose in mind: shade. In the Kurdistan Region, summer temperatures regularly reach 50°C. The canopy Hamou is growing cools the air around his shelter and the road immediately outside it, creating a pocket of green that connects with neighbouring gardens. Imagine these pockets spreading: shaded pathways, lush corridors of greenery, spaces where families and neighbours can pause, breathe and feel a sense of home.

Gardens matter here

There are over 1.34 million displaced people living in Iraq, many of them in camps across the Kurdistan Region. These settlements are often dense and city-like, built quickly and with limited green space.

In this environment, a home garden is not a small thing. The scent of damask rose outside a shelter door, the uplifting colour of zinnias and snapdragons for neighbours passing by, the sight of pomegranates fruiting as a reminder of home, the taste of a tomato grown just steps from home shelter. These things reconnect families with the therapeutic benefits of growing, with their home country and with a sense of agency over their own space. Gardens cool the air, attract birds and pollinators and create places where neighbours come together to chat, swap tips and share seeds and cuttings. They support mental and physical wellbeing and help rebuild community after the upheaval of displacement.

Since 2016, we have planted or distributed over 300,000 trees and plants across the camps. The April Garden of the Month winners are a celebration of what residents do with them.

Support home gardens this spring

This spring, we are raising funds to grow and distribute thousands more trees and plants to families across refugee and IDP (internally displaced people) camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Every donation is being matched by one of our supporters, meaning your gift goes twice as far.

Our target is £30,000 GBP / $39,500 USD.

A single donation can go a long way. £20 could provide vegetable seeds for a household garden. £75 could nurture a young fruit tree from seed to planting. £250 could grow and distribute ten trees across the camps.

The gardens you have seen above began with a packet of seeds or a plant seedling. Your donation this spring could help more people to grow gardens at their home shelters.

Our Annual Garden Competitions are open

Alongside the Garden of the Month award, our Annual Garden Competitions are running over the coming weeks, celebrating the best home gardens across the nine camps in which we work and recognising the skill, creativity and dedication of our gardening community.