Rugeley in Bloom is a community group, dedicated to ensuring that Rugeley town centre is as presentable as possible.  We have adopted seven privately owned but untended flower beds in the town centre, and a passageway.  We have planted these up and added planters to the passageway to improve its visual presentation.  We make up hanging baskets and planters for local businesses so they can improve their shop front.   We entered It’s Your Neighbourhood in 2021 and had a massive level of support from local groups, individuals and business owners.  Town centre-based businesses have been an improvement and a lessening of vandalism and littering.  We have themed each bed to represent the immediate trading locality.  For example in front of the printer, the planters contain flowers and plants that were natural inks and dies from history. By the indoor market we have an edible bed and a wellbeing bed – both with appropriate planting.  We even have a bed nearby a popular public house which has hangover plants in it.

To help the volunteers we have five local businesses who have kindly become our watering can stations, so we can pop in collect and refill when watering the beds.  We have been working well with other community groups and charities and we now run a ‘glut courier’ collecting surplus home-grown produce which is taken directly to our Food Bank.  We plan to grow the number of planting sites and bring together community groups, businesses and schools.