JUDGES are increasingly visiting jails to look at conditions and check on the prospects for rehabilitation. But the public rarely has that opportunity.
Two jails have recently opened their gates, however, to allow people a glimpse of the variety of gardens hidden behind their walls and the tasks that prisoner gardeners perform. The gardens perform a double task: improving the often bleak physical environment but more importantly, helping to rehabilitate prisoners by providing them with employment skills through maintenance and horticulture work.
For the first time, Wormwood Scrubs and Holloway Prison took part in an open garden squares weekend in London. While many are elegant spaces surrounded by black iron railings, the gardens at the West London Scrubs and North London Holloway are surrounded by prison wings and security apparatus.
Christine Stewart, gardens officer at Holloway, said the central garden with its seasonal bedding, a conifer bed and standard roses, set in grass and surrounded by low clipped hedges, benefits both staff and prisoners.
But it is the work done by the prisoners seven days a week that prison staff believe is most beneficial. “We have had very introverted and at times violent women who are unable to express themselves other than in a violent and abusive way but over a period of time, through working in teams, their selfesteem grows and they start learning how to mix and talk with others,” Stewart says.
Advertisement
“It is also about the women getting up in the morning, coming to work and doing the job. It gets them into a routine, a work environment, and that may help them to hold down a job when they leave.”
Inmates can take a National Proficiency Test Certificate in horticulture, and gardening is also used as part of adult literacy classes.
In a shady corner of the garden are boxes of white, red and pink busy lizzies waiting to be planted out in the beds while Sarah Barnes, 27, and Leanne Welsh, 35, water newly planted flowers. Barnes, serving 18 months, has learnt the practicalities of improving the soil and hedge cutting along with the differences between plants and which ones need shade and which prefer more sunlight.
“I know that geraniums are ideal for drought conditions as they don’t need a lot of water. I just weeded when I was at home and never planted anything. Now I know what to plant and at what time of year,” she says. Barnes, a mother of two children aged 8 and 7, would like to find employment linked to gardening when she is released. “I have learnt how to put a hanging basket together and have helped to design a formal garden in the shape of a star,” she says.
Most of the bedding plants come from Ford Open Prison in West Sussex, which has large glasshouses, but the erection of a small greenhouse at Holloway will allow prisoners to grow some plants from seed.
Advertisement
Welsh, who has been in jail on six previous occasions and is serving three months for theft, said she loved the work so much that she would be out gardening all night if allowed to by staff. “It is so nice to see something you have helped to create with your own hands and then be complimented on it,” she says.
Mike Daniels, head of resettlement at Holloway, says that gardening offers women the motivation to go out and work and prepares them for a working environment. “Some women have practical skills and gardening provides an opportunity to give them a skill that they might be able to use when they leave,” he says.
Visitors on the open garden weekend at Holloway Prison were shown the education area, swimming pool and the church, and then walked around the perimeter wall of the 450-inmate jail before being allowed to wander in the central gardens.
If the public does have a chance to look at life in a prison garden, they grasp the opportunity with both hands — the places were fully booked weeks ahead.