St.Richard’s Hospice

Christmas Tree Collection for St. Richard’s Hospice.

One of the great joys about being a landscaper in Worcester and the surrounding areas is just the sheer delight of meeting new clients. Everyone has something interesting to say if you are willing to listen, and often, with almost alarming frequency, I find that recommendations from my existing client base lead to many new enquires for gardening work.

It is a very rewarding thing to achieve such recommendations, and it gives me and my team a wonderful feeling of belonging in the local community. So it is only natural that we should want to give back. St. Richard’s Hospice is a charity that is justifiably well-known throughout Worcester. I know several acquaintances who have personally benefited from the wonderful work of their kind staff, and so I decided that Instant Scenery would participate in a January effort to raise money for the valuable work they do.

We signed up for the Christmas Tree Collection of 2018! It is actually a very good and well thought out fund raising effort: it provides a useful service and raises valuable funds for their work. And, like all good ideas, it is simple: if you have a Christmas tree that you wish to be taken away, then you can book us in, pay a donation to the hospice, and we shall whisk it away! (We then hurl them headfirst through a wood chipper with an insane cackle which . . . well, perhaps that’s not the best thing to tell the children as they wave goodbye to the silent watcher of their Christmas presents!) Nonetheless, most Christmas trees are incapable of being replanted as they will not have a viable root system left after being harvested, and getting rid of them in this way is probably the greenest way to do it.

Anyhow – D-Day arrived: 12th January was our collection day. We carried out 5 trips in total, gathering nearly 15 trees in each one before returning to our deposit centre at Leigh Sinton Christmas Tree Farm (where the chipper waited!) Each tree we picked up from clients across the county was the result of a donation that had been made beforehand: and I believe the donations raised from our own collection of 70 trees on the single day made nearly a thousand pounds for St. Richards.

Though our part was small, the collection continued over that weekend. In last year’s collection, (across the nation with 25 separate collections taking place), a whopping 13,000 Christmas Trees were collected that raised approximately £150,000. It gives me a great sense of fulfilment to have been a small part of this fund raising effort, knowing it will make a very real difference to peoples’ lives in dark times. And as an added bonus, the van now smells of Norwegian Spruce!

Remember to sign up for next year’s collection – but be sure to book it early as this year places were all sold out!

https://www.strichards.org.uk/event/christmas-tree-collection/