Second Gold Medal for Green Fingered Students and Staff.

Chilton maintains it’s gold medal prize winning form at the Somerset School’s Garden Competition held recently at Cannington College. Following on from the ‘Treasure Island’ themed garden last year 2009’s entry was ‘Evolution and Extinction’ in commemoration of Darwins 200th centenary

The fantastic centre piece of this year’s gardens is an amazing recycled sculpture created by seven Year 9 girls as part of their Art’s Award project at an after school club. Working with sculptor Michael West the girls have completed a 2/3rd size female Rhinocerous covered by thousands of reclaimed drinks cans.

The cans were collected as a school wide recycling project and have been flattened and shaped by the girls over the past six months.

This is the first public display of the sculpture and soon it will be permanently placed at Chilton where it will be allowed to weather and blend into it’s surroundings. It will be a permanent reminder of the hard work of a small dedicated group of students.

Over forty students were involved in the garden – designing, modelling and constructing the completed entry. It was a real cross curricula effort with designing and planning taking part in Design Technology, plants (and hard work) by Science and the sculpture within Art.

With the imminent completion of the school’s new Polytunnel and the introduction of a practical landbased course in Science next year we have even more hopes of making it three in a row at the competition.