UPDATE, Saturday 12 March, 1.25pm
All the plants are in! Thanks to another terrific show of volunteer support all the new perennials are settling into their new environment. Apologies to anyone who was thinking of coming along later – we’d love to see you another time.
Exciting news just in: the next order of plants for the nature garden has arrived (from Bampton, west of Oxford – we keep it local if we can). This time it’s a bumper batch of more than 400 perennials, including honeysuckle, foxgloves, ferns, yarrow, bugloss and meadow crane’s bill.
We’d really appreciate your help getting these lovelies safely stowed in the soil. You can volunteer on Saturday March 12 and Sunday March 11 from 10 am.
This is the last big push to get the greenery in the garden established, coupled with wildflower seed-sowing next month.
After that there’s a new gate and a sign to install, and the garden will be ready to receive visitors! Obviously it’ll take a while for the plants to get established, but there are already bulbs poking through and buds on the hedging plants.
Another welcome sighting earlier this month was a mistle thrush chortling in the chestnut. I’m told one of its nicknames is the ‘stormcock’ because it starts trying to pair up before winter is properly over. It’s on the British Trust for Ornithology’s red list of birds of conservation concern, so let’s hope it finds the food and habitat it needs locally.