Over 50 green-fingered volunteers helped to give a young orchard a boost at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB).

As part of the Big Tree Plant, QEHB’s Community Orchard and Gardens saw over 120 new apple, pear, plum, damson and cherry trees planted by hard working volunteers.

Members of the local community, hospital staff, university students and generous volunteers from across Birmingham came along to help plant the new fruit trees in a number of groups at the hospital grounds over 21-22 February 2015.

The Community Orchard and Gardens are the brainchild of Antony Cobley, Senior HR Manager and Equality and Diversity Lead at University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) NHS Foundation Trust which runs QEHB.

The project is being developed with the help of partners Helping Britain Blossom and The Trust Conservation Volunteers.

It will bring together a variety of community groups and organisations to take ownership of unused areas on the Queen Elizabeth site to improve the land for all. By using the land in more creative and sustainable ways, the orchard will not only benefit staff and patients but the wider community.

“The idea for the project is to give people somewhere to get away from it all for a few minutes of peace and quiet, whether they are staff or patients,” said Antony.

“We have purposefully planted British fruit varieties and those which are from the Midlands.” he added.

Volunteers have already planted more than 1,000 trees on the hospital site with over 100 new whips (a young tree seedling) also planted across the weekend.

This new orchard will complement a number of health and wellbeing initiatives already in place or planned at QEHB, such as a monthly Farmer’s Market, vegetable plots and a woodland walk.

Antony said: “The number of volunteers who came along and gave up their Saturday and Sunday afternoons was excellent and so generous, they all worked tremendously hard to get these trees in the ground.

“This is a long-term project. It will be four or five years before we start cropping decent amounts of fruit, but the beauty of it is that a well-managed orchard will then go on for decades helping patients at the hospitals and local people.”

The produce coming from the orchard will be used to help people in the local area, to teach them how to grow, tend, cook and prepare food and it will all be donated to benefit the community.

Rob Tilling, Birmingham’s Helping Britain Blossom Project Manager, said: “For some communities in Birmingham, there’s little or no access to green space. Orchards are a great way of bringing locals together. A community orchard isn’t just a collection of trees, it’s a community of people working together to make the local area a better place to live, work and enjoy.”

To find out more or to get involved in future activities, please email QEHB’s Community Orchard and Gardens mailbox.

Email: Orchard@uhb.nhs.uk

For more information about Helping Britain Blossom, please visit their website.