We maintain a number of sites across Bournbrook where we manage the spaces to bring something green and wonderful to the community.

You may have noticed the four big concrete planter boxes based along Dartmouth Road. These were rejuvenated last year, with help from the wonderful students of Tiverton Academy, who joined Community Wardens in planting lots of wild native seed.

The purpose of this was following a drive by Kew Gardens, London, through a project called ‘Grow Wild’ , to raise awareness of the decline in native wild flowers. They not only tell people about this risk to our wild flowers, but supply funding too. The Community Warden project was lucky in not only having some seed supplied, but funding too which helped us to buy extra tools and extend the project this year, more in a moment.

So the boxed in Dartmouth were planted with a variety of wild flowers including: Corn Chamomile, Ladies Bedstraw, Cornflowers and lots of others.

They are still in the early stages of being established, but are progressing along nicely. The scheme maintains them on occasion, mainly in ensuring that litter is taken away (yes – some people actually throw litter in these spaces)  and certain plants (also known as weeds) don’t become too evasive. But for the most part we don’t aim to interfere too much so as to allow the plots to develop as normal wild meadow or piece of ground may if left to its own devices.

As a follow-up to this, we have extended the project this year by appealing to local student residents who have abandoned back gardens to get in touch with us. We will visit with wild seed (sourced from a wild flower farm) and help to advise where to grow  and help with initial planting.

If you would like to know more – contact us.

As an add on to this we also care for a plot in Dawlish Road, near to Exeter Road. This has sadly been dumped on a little by some builders, but contains lots of plants, including a Laburnum tree, daffodils and various other trees and shrubs. Its a bit of mini-woodland in the making.

We aim to work on this during the summer to undertake a little bit of pruning and re-planting.

So watch this space