Why I am a WAGA

A Wild About Gardens Advisor (WAGA) is a volunteer advisor working in the Wild About Gardens (WAG) team. I have volunteered for Kent Wildlife Trust in various roles over the years, on The Larches reserve, in the garden at Tyland Barn but mainly in the Education Team. I had known Maureen Rainey, who manages WAG, for years so when I felt that working with children was becoming rather hard work, the obvious next step was to become a WAGA.

At the time WAG ran an awards scheme where gardeners entered their gardens in the scheme and were visited by an advisor. The advisor gave advice on how to improve the garden for wildlife and gave a level of award to the gardener. The training for volunteers was, and still is, very thorough. Plenty of training sessions on aspects of wildlife gardening and mentoring by more experienced colleagues prepared us for the role. Maureen’s organisation has always been extremely good so the scheme functions very well and gives the advisors plenty of support. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting gardeners and talking about wildlife gardening and meeting with colleagues at our training sessions.

Then there was COVID and we had to stop the scheme. Maureen, inventive as usual, found ways to continue WAG in some way. We had a lot of training on zoom and ran workshops for the public on zoom. Last summer we had a series of wildlife friendly Open Gardens using volunteers’ gardens which were very popular. During the winter we had training sessions and workshops for the public and are running Open Gardens again this summer. Details of all our public events can be found here.

Volunteering for WAG is a very positive experience. There is always something new to learn and people to chat with who are interested in gardening and wildlife as well as being very pleasant and thoughtful people. If you are interested in volunteering with us contact Maureen Rainey via email Maureen.rainey@kentwildlife.org.uk or come to one of our Open Gardens to see what we do and meet us.