Windsor Flower Show Container Garden

Our Pre-Prep Pupils Create Vibrant ‘Rainbow Jungle’ Garden for the Royal Windsor Flower Show

Children in Pre-Prep, along with Mrs Powell-Harper and Mrs McLean, have been busy working on their special garden project for their entry for this year’s Royal Windsor Flower Show.  We are excited to enter in the Community Container Competition category. Our Boarder’s Garden has been a hive of busy activity bringing project to life with colour, creativity…and lots of muddy fun.

The children have titled the garden The Rainbow Jungle and it has been designed in pops of rainbow colours in drawers of an upcycled chest of drawers.  The chest has kindly been donated by a local family, happy to see it be used for a school planting project. Each year group, from Nursery to Year 2, helped to design, paint, grow or plant for the container, transforming the chest into a living tribute — filled with vibrant blooms and trailing greenery, arranged to represent the colours of the rainbow. The container includes blue Skylover, purple Verbena, mauve Delight, white trailing Snowflake, green Creeping Jenny, yellow Golden Daisies, orange Estrella and red Petunias. We also snuck in some strawberries…but hopefully our little snail doesn’t get to them before the show!

Some of the plants have  been grown at school…although some of our planting has had mixed success. It turns out that some of the little fingers aren’t very green!  In preparation for the big day, we have had a local hero come to the rescue.  The delightful Jim at Dunkirk Nursery in Egham, has helped the children’s vision come to life. His own greenhouses packed with glorious flowers and baskets and are worth a visit. Some of his blooms feature in our drawers.

At St John’s Beaumont, children are encouraged to connect with nature on a regular basis. Our 75-acre school grounds are home to a thriving woodland Forest School, a hands-on Cottage (Boarder’s) Garden, and the much-loved Roost — where our recently adopted chickens and guinea pigs live and are cared for by our pupils. The outdoors plays an important part in daily life, and projects like The Rainbow Jungle are a wonderful extension of this ethos, offering children opportunities to explore sustainability, creativity, and most importantly, community.

This vibrant little jungle-in-a-drawer is much more than a garden — it’s a story of imagination and about little hands working together to grow something! The garden will be proudly displayed at the Royal Windsor Flower Show on Saturday, 7th June, where it is sure to charm visitors with ‘in-the-round’. And hopefully we will come away with the Andrew Try Cup for our inaugural entry.

A young girl in a striped shirt and pink leggings smiles while helping to paint wooden drawers white outside on a grassy lawn, with sunlight and garden surroundings. A wooden chest of drawers with a distressed white finish stands outdoors. All four drawers are partially open, and the top surface is missing. The background shows a garden with grass, bushes, and a red playhouse. A dark blue wooden chest painted with handprint flowers, green stems, and leaves. Small painted bees fly above the flowers. The chest sits on a sheet outdoors with paint supplies nearby. A garden and fence are in the background. A blue wooden drawer is repurposed as a garden planter with various green and flowering plants growing out of the top, standing on grass with a fence and leafy bushes in the background. A brown snail crawls on a blue surface next to soil and green leafy plants. The background includes more vegetation and blurred greenery. A blue dresser with drawers partly open, repurposed as a garden planter, filled with various green plants and colorful flowers, set outdoors on grass with leafy bushes in the background. A colorful garden planter overflows with pink, yellow, white, and purple flowers, green foliage, and a bee decoration, set against a leafy background. A child wearing a white shirt, navy shorts, black shoes, and yellow gloves is gardening outdoors, planting yellow flowers in soil on the grass. Gardening supplies and small pots are scattered around. A blue chest of drawers repurposed as a garden planter, filled with colorful flowers and green plants overflowing from the open drawers, set outdoors with greenery in the background.