Lemon Tree Trust featured in new book celebrating the power of gardens to change lives
Gardens That Can Save the World, a new book by award-winning garden designer Lottie Delamain, features Lemon Tree Trust and we are honoured to be included.
The book, published on 12 March by Thames & Hudson, brings together 65 projects from around the world, exploring how gardens and growing can address some of the most pressing challenges people face today, from climate change and food insecurity to isolation, displacement and trauma.
Lemon Tree Trust features in the EMPOWER chapter, under the heading Grow plants to connect you to home, which gathers stories of gardens growing in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances, including refugee camps and conflict zones in Iraq, Gaza, Ukraine and beyond. The chapter focuses in particular on our Garden of the Month initiative, which runs across nine refugee and internally displaced persons camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The initiative supports displaced communities to create and tend their own garden spaces, recognising that growing things, however modest the plot, can restore a sense of dignity, agency and belonging when so much else has been lost.
Lottie writes of how the Garden of the Month award brings “much needed pride, joy and wellbeing in stark and uncertain times” and reflects on what gardeners in displacement choose to grow: not only food, but flowers that carry memory, beauty and a sense of home.
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