Nature garden
12 April 2008 19:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enismirdalAs previously mentioned, I volunteered to help out with cleaning up a local nature garden. I managed to con 2 out of 3 flatmates into helping me, so today we toddled down in old clothes and tough shoes to do some good, honest hard work. The nature garden is considerably larger than I thought, and absolutely delightful - it's unfortunately got enormously overgrown with nettles, stickyweed, brambles and suckers (dogwood?), but there are plenty of proper woodland herbs underneath, and there are only a few very small sycamore saplings.
We saw scilla, roast-beef iris (Wow! That stuff smells interesting!), alkannet (which is a bit out of hand so we plan to remove some), aconite, honesty, garlic mustard, lesser celandine, greater celandine, violets, toadflax, lots of daffodils and grape hyacinths. The trees include proper secondary woodland trees - poplar, birch, ash, hawthorn. It's going to be a few more decades before it takes on true ancient woodland form and we might be lucky enough to get herb paris (I hold out hope!), but for now it's doing really well.
The amount of rubbish we cleared out was...immense. The compost heap of biodegradable waste (mostly suckers, brambles and stickyweed) was well above my head by the time we stopped. And as for the bags of rubbish we left out for the council to collect... Twenty black sacks or more, I estimate. Some were seriously heavy. The far end of the garden has only a thin fence separating it from a slightly rough estate, and the amount of dumped stuff was horrendous. Deck chairs, wood, paint tins, builder's plaster, a jacket.
A cute find was a WWF wrestling belt - a couple of dozen snails had decided it made a good home and so were sitting all over it. Win! Not so hard now, are you, Mr Snail-Covered Wrestler! Also, a working radio turned up in among the debris. So next time, we will garden to music!
There's still a lot to do - we got out much of the rubbish and cleared back a good quantity of weeds, but come next month when we're doing this again, there will be plenty more weeds and litter! Still, we made a HUGE difference (Linda, the Environment Trust organiser, has Before and After photos which I'll post if I can get them) - it looks less like a forest of doom and more like a woodland glade now, and the weather held right up until it was time to go, hooray!
And of course, it wouldn't have been possible without Scruffy the Wonder Dog - a mad little Jack Russel owned by Paul, the other volunteer helping out (who knows an immense amount about wild plants, it's fantastic).
I'm now shattered, but happy, and absolutely covered in scratches and nettle stings - from my wrists halfway to my elbows is all weird and pins-and-needles from the nettles, tee-hee! (No, I don't mind really - it makes me feel like I'd worked hard!)
We saw scilla, roast-beef iris (Wow! That stuff smells interesting!), alkannet (which is a bit out of hand so we plan to remove some), aconite, honesty, garlic mustard, lesser celandine, greater celandine, violets, toadflax, lots of daffodils and grape hyacinths. The trees include proper secondary woodland trees - poplar, birch, ash, hawthorn. It's going to be a few more decades before it takes on true ancient woodland form and we might be lucky enough to get herb paris (I hold out hope!), but for now it's doing really well.
The amount of rubbish we cleared out was...immense. The compost heap of biodegradable waste (mostly suckers, brambles and stickyweed) was well above my head by the time we stopped. And as for the bags of rubbish we left out for the council to collect... Twenty black sacks or more, I estimate. Some were seriously heavy. The far end of the garden has only a thin fence separating it from a slightly rough estate, and the amount of dumped stuff was horrendous. Deck chairs, wood, paint tins, builder's plaster, a jacket.
A cute find was a WWF wrestling belt - a couple of dozen snails had decided it made a good home and so were sitting all over it. Win! Not so hard now, are you, Mr Snail-Covered Wrestler! Also, a working radio turned up in among the debris. So next time, we will garden to music!
There's still a lot to do - we got out much of the rubbish and cleared back a good quantity of weeds, but come next month when we're doing this again, there will be plenty more weeds and litter! Still, we made a HUGE difference (Linda, the Environment Trust organiser, has Before and After photos which I'll post if I can get them) - it looks less like a forest of doom and more like a woodland glade now, and the weather held right up until it was time to go, hooray!
And of course, it wouldn't have been possible without Scruffy the Wonder Dog - a mad little Jack Russel owned by Paul, the other volunteer helping out (who knows an immense amount about wild plants, it's fantastic).
I'm now shattered, but happy, and absolutely covered in scratches and nettle stings - from my wrists halfway to my elbows is all weird and pins-and-needles from the nettles, tee-hee! (No, I don't mind really - it makes me feel like I'd worked hard!)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 18:46 (UTC)I hope you manage to get hold of the before and after pics, I'd love to see them.
Roast-beef iris?
no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 18:55 (UTC)The roast-beef iris is weird - if you crush the leaves, it smells like roast beef flavour crisps. Seriously! It was quite surreal just how strong the scent was! At the moment they're not in flower but I'm excited to see what they will look like in a few more months.
no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 19:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 19:24 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 19:29 (UTC)I think I read somewhere stinging nettles are great pain reliever for people with arthritis.
Mel
no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 20:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Apr 2008 20:17 (UTC)Does sound fun.
Abner