In May we held a webinar called ‘Greening Your Street’ to hopefully inspire people, especially our keen wildlife gardeners, to encourage their neighbours to take action for nature with them and create corridors of wildlife friendly habitat throughout our towns and villages.

Chris's street

It was really heartening to hear from Chris, one of our volunteers, how the webinar had inspired him to take to his street and get them on boar. Here’s Chris’ story so far:

Inspired by the "Greening your Street" webinar (which can be watched again below) I thought it would be a good idea to get something going locally.

Not wishing to be "a lone nutter" I forwarded a link to the webinar to a few like-minded neighbours and quite quickly four of us joined forces as the "Trindles Road Wildlife Warriors" (see photograph) in South Nutfield, and held our first informal meeting.

We agreed to make and paint blue hearts to site in our front gardens for passers-by to notice. There are no grass verges in our road so we are either making changes in front gardens, or flagging that we have already made changes in our rear gardens.

We followed this up with a circular introducing our group with a few simple top tips for wildlife friendly gardens and encouraging neighbours to take the wildlife trusts garden wildlife survey.

With an open allotment event scheduled in the village we were able to arrange a promotional stall for the afternoon, with a variety of wildlife gardening literature available to view or take away. We had a constant trickle of visitors with varying degrees of enthusiasm but there was always someone engaged in conversation throughout.

A small supply of plywood unpainted or blue hearts were taken for a small donation – so we now have some funds to make more. We are hopeful that we might see them appearing around the village soon, and maybe some other roads will get on board with their own groups.

We will be meeting informally again in one of our gardens soon to agree our next actions, and try our hand at bat detecting.

Chris - SWT member, volunteer

Louise's street

In my own road in Epsom, it has been lovely to watch my neighbours’ verges grow and bloom and I was amazed in April at how many people came along to our blue heart event where we decorated blue heart signs with logos such as ‘Bee friendly’ ‘Go wild’ and ‘Bee wild’ for our front gardens and pledged to turn our verges over to nature.  It has been so encouraging and there is even a neighbour who, at the start of spring, was spraying ‘weeds’ with herbicide, who is now leaving a strip to grow wild.

The keener gardeners in the street took meadow creation seriously and stripped back their turf and planted packs of wildflower seeds in late April – I was interested to see if they had left it too late as the seeds got off to a very slow start as this spring was so cold.  By July though they were a mass of colourful flowers (see photos above) and they really have been the talking point of the street.

1) Buttercups and speedwell in early summer; 2) Pyramidal Orchid appearing in June 3) Selfheal carpeting verges in July

Personally, I have really enjoyed the extra time not weeding and mowing has given me in the garden and I’ve spent many evenings delving into the grass to see what species have appeared all by themselves.  

Give it a try - it’s very therapeutic!! The verges began with flushes of daisies, buttercups, dandelions, speedwell and plantain which were then superseded with the brighter splashes of summer colours as red poppies, purple self -heal, yellow catsears and hawkbits and blue bellflowers came into flower. 

As I write the beautiful white clouds of yarrow flowers are now dominating in amongst the tall grasses.  For some neighbours this first year has been underwhelming as their lawns up to now have been so carefully managed that the months of no mow saw little more than lush long rye grass.  If your lawn is fairly pristine, then adding a few plug plants will help get your wildlife lawns underway – cowslips, primroses, ox-eye daisies, knapweed and scabious do really well as plug plants and come back year after year

A few highlights along the road were pyramidal orchids appearing in two of our neighbours verges.  But it hasn’t just been the plants – four of us have installed small ponds and I saw my first newt in my garden in 15 years of living there. Log piles and bug hotels have gone in and our local whatsapp chat group had several sightings of stag beetles reported. 

These sightings were celebrated – which is real progress when I think back to my first experience of a stag beetle in the road was seeing an elderly neighbour dispatching it with a baseball bat!!  Also another neighbour (armed with binoculars and a bird book) excitedly called me over to report a turtle dove in the garden – unfortunately I did not see it but I have to believe him as he spends many hours watching the birds in his garden and who knows, maybe the wilder lawns attracted this now rare and beautiful bird down to feed. Other birds benefiting from the wilder lawns are goldfinches – charms fly up as you walk down the road after feasting on the seeds of dandelions, thistles and others.

If you are looking to create a meadow yourself now is  a good time to start thinking about it.  In our countryside this is when our wildflower seeds are ripening and dropping to the ground –some species will germinate now and others will need the winter frosts to trigger germination.

There’s lots of information to be found on the Wildlife Trust’s website about meadow creation.

But for now, all the neighbours are looking to me for advice on what to do next with the long grass – in the absence of Poldark with his scythe, I think it will be a case of carefully checking the verges for any signs of life e.g pushing through gently with the back of a rake, and getting the hand shears out. 

Larger areas are likely to involve strimming (again after a careful check for amphibians, slow worms and hedgehogs etc).  Afterwards we will leave the cuttings to drop their seed before composting them- removing the cuttings prevents the return of nutrients to the soil which would just encourage the grass to take over again next year. 

The addition of yellow rattle seed will hopefully parasitize the grass, weaken it and allow more beautiful wildflowers to take hold next summer.  And then we will probably sit down and have another G&T!!

Louise Shorthose, Outdoor Learning Manager SWT