Green gyms in Northern Ireland

All Green gyms involve maintaining the landscape - perhaps creating an allotment, planting a public space or a garden - or working on wilder areas like woods.  The Green Gyms have a retention rate of over 85% of users, compared to conventional gyms which hold onto just 40% of users.  Users begin with stretching exercises before spending an hour or two on gardening work. Project monitoring has shown that 90% of participants show improvements in cardiovascular fitness, and most state that they feel more positive about themselves too.

Dianne Keys runs the project in the Belfast area.  Her team were responsible for creating a garden in an old people's 'fold' - a kind of sheltered housing.  Local primary school children built the garden and chose the plants.  Working with children means that they take pride in their neighbourhoods and are less likely to damage new planting schemes.  The days are also an opportunity to talk about food: a 'lunchbox challenge' encourges children to consume more fruit and vegetables and less crisps, sweets and odd blue fizzy drinks.

Keys says 'I've been in projects where children are so removed from the natural world that they are completely astonished to see potatoes coming out of the ground'.

Green gyms also work with people with severe mental health problems.  Recently, they've been taking a group from a Belfast psychiatric hospital to create an allotment.  The area is  part of a patch of land used by the general public and so gives an opportunity for psychiatric patients to discard their label and work together on a shared project.  Occupational therapists accompany the group and note less smoking and a greater calm in patients who attend.  They can continue to come to the gyms after they leave hospital. 

A certain amount of allotment competitiveness has set in.  Keys says 'we're supposed to be the experts at this, so everyone involved plots about how to make our allotment better than the others.'

What's unique about the work is that communities themselves can decide how they want to regenerate a piece of land - choosing native or exotic plants - deciding if they want flowers for beauty or vegetables for eating.  Reclaiming a pocket of land and making it thrive taps into a very old human urge - one often disregarded as owning a garden increasingly becomes a luxury for the well off.