It's become traditional for the August meeting of the Berkshire Greenpeace group to take place on the roof garden at the RISC Centre in Reading, and this year's meeting was no exception.
The roof garden was built several years ago when a need for urgent repairs to a flat roof at the centre provided an opportunity to develop a unique environmental and educational resource. Every single plant growing in the garden can be eaten as a food, used for medicinal purposes, or has some other human use. The garden is regularly visited by schools and is open to the public on Royal Horticultural Society open days. It's a quiet oasis in a busy part of town, and a perfect place to spend a long summer evening relaxing with a nice drink.
This month we were delighted to welcome plenty of new faces to the group, attracted by Greenpeace's current global campaign to declare the Arctic a world park and protect it from oil drilling by companies like Shell. Quite a lot of people took the opportunity to have a look round the garden as others arrived, and we began the meeting in style with a glass of Pimms for everyone.
No sooner had the formal business started, however, than the clouds began to gather and the raindrops started falling - the one drawback to having an outdoor meeting! We headed back inside the centre and spent the next couple of hours planning our campaigns and activities for the next couple of months - about which you will be able to read more in due course! ;-)
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