St Mark’s church has been given approval for a community garden on the Southeast corner of their property.Meanwhile cedar and olivewood are to be planted in a conservation area between the garden and the church’s graveyard as part of an approved conservation management plan for the area.Church Warden Colin Campbell said the garden is hoped to protect and enhance the value of the church, while giving the community a means to improve their way of life.“In order for the church to be successful, it needs to be relevant for more than one day of the week,” he said. “We need to be more than just a pew on Sunday.“We know from working with the Hospital that gardening lowers blood pressure, and for many it promotes calm and peace.“I spoke with a bus driver who gardens at the Foot of the Lane Community Garden, and she spoke very eloquently about it. It offered her a relief from the food bill and emotional relief. She also went to church, but gardening and going to church connected her to her spiritual self much more than just going to church alone.”In addition to the spiritual benefits of gardening, Mr Campbell said the financial impact on a household can be tremendous, and with the cost of food on the rise that benefit will only grow.“The value of food, the cost of food is going to rise and it’s going to rise every single year,” he said. “It has to. It must.“However we have this wonderful gift of the soil beneath our feet and the sun in the sky, and if we can use that to supplement our food budget it will make a real difference.“Can you think of a better rate of return than a packet of seeds at $2 if you can feed a while bunch of people with that investment?”He explained that each plot would be around 12ft by 12 ft, meaning that they can be easily managed in just a few hours a week.Each of the plots will be leased for around $110 per year, but Mr Campbell said the fee is only to cover the costs of the garden and not to turn a profit.“There’s no money to be made out of the thing,” he said. “It’s about how do we cover the costs, provide a service and hopefully convince more people to attend.”Should the project be a success, Mr Campbell said he would like to see a weekly farmer’s market at the church, where gardeners can sell their produce and other goods while interacting with other members of the community.St Mark’s church had faced criticism after around non-endemic 15 trees were cleared from the area, which is zoned as an agricultural and conservation area, as workers installed a sidewalk on South Shore Road last April.He said the incident resulted in a “silly sort of Mexican standoff,” but that the matter has since been resolved and everyone is happy.Cedar trees have since been planted in the area, and Mr Campbell said the church hopes to selectively remove invasive plants and replace them with indigenous species.Mr Campbell said the property was given to the church in the 1930s so that they could expand their graveyard. Since then, farmers have used a portion of the property for silage while the rest has grown wild.“We would like to back plant in that area and put back in place as many Bermuda endemics as we can,” he said.“There is a lot of Mexican pepper in there that we want to clean out and replace. Make it a simple, sustainable landscape solution.”