The weather was near-perfect as 100 guests gathered from Armidale and all over the region, in Guyra resident Di Crossing’s garden.

Jane McCowen said that she had been supporting the school for over a decade. 

“I have been raising funds for this school for the past 11 years,” ms McCowen said.

The money raised goes towards projects including providing lunch for students during holidays and paid the wages of two teachers in 2016.

Funds are also used for supplying school equipment, maintaining buildings and sporting equipment and enabling the purchase of uniforms and computers.

Guyra Garden Club committee member, Robyn Jackson said the club, which is around 30 years old, was grateful to be able to support such a worthy cause.

“Today is all about raising money for a school in East Timor,” Ms Jackson said.

“We meet every month and we are a very progressive, interesting garden club.

“We specialise in visits to gardens for our meetings rather than having them in halls.

“We have a wide ranging amount of members who come from as far as Inverell, Ebor, Dundee, Armidale and Uralla and so we have a wonderful and wide divergence of members and we prevail upon people to let us be in their gardens.”

Ms Jackson said the group are always looking for generous people to open up their gardens.

“It’s only a little bit of hands up behind the back but we can generally get somewhere really lovely to go,” she said.

“We love gardens … whether they’re just progressing or whether they’re new gardens like this with lovely old trees.”

“[Having variety] allows us to see what the trees are like when they’re mature [and young] because otherwise you don’t always know what they’re going to be like.”

The group travel throughout the district to visit gardens in their yearly meet up and occasionally have long trips away.