Polka’s Wimbledon Foundation Garden

30th May 2025

Written by Jo Turner, Polka’s Community Gardener, May 2025

 

Polka Theatre is full of surprises.

Given the Theatre’s location on The Broadway in the centre of busy Wimbledon, you could be forgiven for assuming that the built-up surroundings leave little room for greenery and nature. Yet, nestled just to the left of the Theatre between the main building and the adjacent church, you will find a little oasis of peace and verdure amidst the bustle of urban life: Polka’s Wimbledon Foundation Garden, transformed since 2021 with the generous help of the Wimbledon Foundation. This hidden gem is free to enjoy and accessible to all, not just for those who visit the Theatre but also for the local community as a whole.

 

Recent developments

In the past 16 months since I joined the Polka team as community gardener, there have been lots of changes to this already beautiful space. The new interactive play equipment – including a wooden seating ‘pod’, an extremely popular ball run, an innovative sensory panel, and a community book box – has transformed the garden, proving more than enough to tempt children outside on even the rainiest or coldest of days. It offers a fun and dynamic outdoor experience, delighting children of all ages, in a safe and welcoming outside space.

But nature still takes centre stage here. The borders flanking the natural limestone pathway have been replenished with fresh new growth, carefully selected to suit the partially (and in some places fully) shaded position of the garden and heavy clay soil. With a focus on sensory planting and wildlife enhancement, our aim was to encourage a fuller and richer garden experience for both children and adults alike. We chose plants that stimulate the senses: golden oregano for its sweet, peppery fragrance; ferns for their feathery texture and dramatically unfurling fronds; hardy geraniums for their prolific purple colour; lady’s mantle for its unique ability to collect water droplets on its scalloped leaves like tiny sparkling jewels. The array of grasses in the garden offers wide tactile variety: the graceful but tough New Zealand satin flower (so called because of its silky, erect blades); the delicate, stripey-leaved Japanese sedge; the Mexican feathergrass with its soft, flowing, thread-like foliage. Recently we have also introduced some herb planters to increase our collection of scents in the garden. The planters host shade-tolerant herbs that present a carnival for the nostrils: silvery curry plant, bronze fennel, lemon balm, garlicky chives, and even chocolate mint! This sensory planting allows children to connect with nature in a more immersive way, focusing both their minds and bodies on the natural beauty and diversity of their surroundings, which in turn enhances their wellbeing.

We also wanted plants with wildlife advantages, helping to promote biodiversity in the garden and provide spaces for creatures of various types to live and to thrive. We chose Siberian bugloss for its airy displays of tiny blue flowers, rich in nectar that attracts bees and hoverflies; red escallonia for its dense growth and thick foliage giving shelter for various insects; geraniums for their long-flowering habit supplying a reliable food source for butterflies, moths, and other pollinators. We also added log piles as an insect habitat, to complement the bug hotels, bird houses, and bat boxes already in place. Encouraging these creatures into the garden gives children the chance to investigate wildlife in a real-life, real-time way. Seeing the enchantment on their faces as they watch a caterpillar make its way up a stem is a beautiful reminder of nature’s distinctive ability to captivate.

 

 

Challenges

No garden is without its challenges, and Polka is no exception! Polka’s urban setting means that the high-walled buildings surrounding it block out substantial amounts of light casting a ‘rain shadow’ over some of our borders (hence the need for our drip irrigation system). At the same time, the excess of concrete in a city environment affects drainage, causing the soil to become saturated during inclement weather. Covering the beds with a thick layer of bark chip has helped to balance moisture levels and lessen waterlogging. In addition, pests in urban areas are often concentrated in a given spot, having limited habitat range, and this can cause problems – with last year’s very wet Spring came an abundance of slugs and snails which chewed their way through many of our plants, decimating several newly planted specimens and damaging others. The Polka Café helpfully supplied used ground coffee beans and egg shells, which we added to our wheat bran and wool pellets to form ‘rings of steel’ around the targeted plants. Alas, none of this was quite enough to deter our slimy residents! Happily, some of the plants have recovered a little this year, with the drier weather bringing fewer slugs. We still hold a (probably vain) hope of enticing hedgehogs to our garden to manage the problem for us!

Another challenge has been a welcome one in many respects, but a challenge nonetheless: little feet trampling the plants! Whilst we aim to encourage exploration, a few of our plants have suffered some rather heavy footfall and we have had to give some areas over to soil. We plan to introduce some taller plants in other areas, hopefully better able to withstand enthusiastic visitors!

 

Volunteer involvement

Polka’s incredible volunteer team has played a significant role in creating and nurturing this garden. Community gardening sessions take place fortnightly during the growing season, and during these sessions our keen volunteers get involved in all sorts of aspects of gardening, from general maintenance such as weeding, pruning, feeding, and mulching, to participating in exciting new projects such as planting the herb garden and adding summer bedding. One of our much-loved volunteers, Shirley, frequently comments how much she enjoys caring for the Polka Garden: “It warms my heart,” she says fondly. Certainly, tending a garden provides a sense of purpose and accomplishment, besides the well-documented cognitive and physical benefits. It has been a pleasure to share these joys with the volunteer team.

 

Creative learning

While most of the hard work on the garden takes place during the community gardening sessions, our Saturday Club children have also played a part. During April’s Saturday Club, the children enjoyed planting out violas, adding pops of colour all along the beds. Digging holes for their chosen viola, putting it in place, bedding it in, and watering it gave the children first-hand gardening experience, with very pleasing results!

Recently, Polka’s Creative Learning team has also produced a garden activity sheet that seeks to help children engage with the garden on a number of different levels. A ‘leaf hunt’ activity encourages children to familiarise themselves with leaf shapes and textures – from a prickly holly leaf to soft fern fronds to smooth blades of grass. Continuing the sensory theme, the children are asked to identify garden sounds: cooing pigeons, the rustling of the wind through the trees, the buzzing of a bee. To pique their interest in wildlife, we suggest spotting some of our wild visitors and connecting them with their habitat needs. We hope this will spur them on to investigate the garden more closely, encounter fresh aspects of their outdoor environment, and develop new skills and interests in the process.

 

 

Upcoming projects

In the next few months, we are planning to introduce some additional elements to the garden. One current project involves the construction of a hazel trellis, which will serve as a supporting structure for a new star jasmine to climb, using hazel poles coppiced from the garden earlier this year. Coppicing hazel is an ancient practice that involves cutting its stems down to just a few inches above the soil, which can appear quite dramatic but has multiple benefits. It prolongs the tree’s life by encouraging fresh growth from the base, so that instead of its usual 80-year lifespan it might live on for several hundred years. It helps to provide new and varied opportunities for flora and fauna by allowing more sunlight to penetrate the area around it. Importantly, it also gives us very useful materials – hazel branches are long and straight and flexible, and it is these branches that we are planning to employ in our new trellis. Watch this space!

We are also hoping to introduce some more plants for winter interest, such as sweet box – a hardy shrub that boasts plentiful and highly fragrant white flowers from December to March – and hellebores, whose graceful flowerheads appear during the same period, peeping out from beneath rich green, palmate leaves. We are keen for the garden to provide year-round enjoyment, with something new to explore every season, keeping us all on our toes!

 

Nature’s theatre

Working on the Polka Garden has been an inspiring experience for me. Whilst it may be just a small part of all that Polka has to offer, it is nonetheless a living, breathing, beautiful example of what I’ve come to understand as nature’s own theatre. A garden is like a stage: nature – in all its diversity – is the performer, and we gardeners are the directors. The audience – all those who come to enjoy the ‘show’ – get to revel in a thoroughly immersive and interactive theatrical experience, which thrills the senses, enthrals the mind, and – in Shirley’s words – warms the heart.

As I walk underneath the arch of the hawthorn trees, the dappled sunlight shifting, the grasses swaying, the osmanthus leaves dancing, the robins whistling, the smell of the damp soil rising, the cheerful viola flowers smiling, I am convinced afresh: theatre happens as much outdoors as indoors.

 

 

A special thanks to The Wimbledon Foundation for their continuous support of the garden.
The Wimbledon Foundation Garden is open Tuesday – Sunday. For more information, please visit the Your Visit Page.