Every one of Dobbies' 53 garden centres across the UK has now chosen a local gardening project to champion, matching green spaces with the communities that will benefit from them most. The garden centre chain has launched its Community Gardens initiative to answer hundreds of applications from schools, nurseries, care homes, and neighbourhood gardens hungry for resources and expertise—and the response reveals something quietly powerful: the appetite for shared green spaces is far outstripping what most communities can manage alone.
What makes this initiative matter is the kind of support it offers. It's not just a sponsorship cheque; Dobbies' teams are rolling up their sleeves to volunteer, donating plants, compost, grow-your-own kits, and essential tools. These aren't abstract resources. They're the difference between a bare corner of earth and a thriving space where elderly residents can gather, where children learn where food comes from, and where isolated people find reason to be outdoors with others.
One of the 53 projects tells that story clearly. Age UK Folkestone, selected by the Ashford store, runs a small gardening club within its visitors' centre for people aged 55 and over. The centre offers home-cooked meals and regular activities, but it's the garden—where members grow vegetables and flowers together and maintain the grounds as a group—that provides something harder to quantify: purpose, connection, fresh air, and a sense of contribution. Many of the centre's visitors are elderly or living with disabilities. Sandra Gillett from Age UK Folkestone was direct about what they needed: "help to add some flowering plants and shrubs to our raised beds to help add colour and brighten the day of everyone who visits." With Dobbies' support, that garden will become more vibrant, more inviting, more capable of drawing people in.
Nigel Lawton, Dobbies' Plant Buyer, acknowledged the scale of what the company received: "We received hundreds of entries from inspiring groups across the country, all with a shared passion for bringing their garden projects to life." The difficult part wasn't finding worthy causes—it was choosing just 53. Each store's selection represents not just a nod to a local group but a commitment: volunteer hours from staff who understand plants and soil and what makes a garden work, alongside the physical materials that transform an idea into a planted reality.
What emerges from this is a picture of community gardens as infrastructure—the kind of small but essential infrastructure that improves people's lives in ways that don't always show up in economic data. A raised bed of shrubs brightens the day of someone who rarely leaves their home. A group of schoolchildren learning to grow their own food develops a relationship to nature that lasts a lifetime. A care home with a thriving garden becomes a place residents actually want to be, not just a place they're cared for.
The initiative suggests a model too: large organisations with resources and expertise partnering with hyperlocal groups that know what their communities actually need. Dobbies has made it one project per store—simple, scalable, and manageable. That structure means the support is likely to be real and sustained rather than performative. As Lawton put it, they're looking forward to "seeing how these projects develop and the positive difference they will make." With 53 communities getting the plants, tools, and hands they asked for, that difference is already beginning to grow.