Dreaming of blooms and butterflies – our Green Corridor workshop

Greenhavens recently organised a workshop to start mapping the green corridors in Greenhavens. Vicki Ashley (who words for SCDA) kindly wrote us a blog about the evening.

About 15-20 people turned up to the recent bee corridor workshop. A great number considering the weather was not at its best, so thank you for those of you who came out of your nice warm homes to join in on this future venture.

At the workshop there were a great bunch of local people & experts partaking in some ‘Green Spaces’ brain storming. Among the participants there were Greenhavens members, SDNP representatives, local residents, tree wardens and community garden members. We worked in small groups, looking at local maps of Peacehaven, Telscombe Cliffs, Newhaven and Seaford.

Within these groups we had some in-depth local knowledge of good ‘unknown areas’ that would be ideal for wild flowers, to enable the movement of bees and other pollinators to freely hop from spot to spot between the towns.

We were surprised to see areas that could easily be turned into meadow areas. For example in Peacehaven, at the end of the blocked off avenues leading to the South Coast Rd, there is a square plot of land that is not used for anything other than a walk through. This would be ideal, not only super useful for the pollinators but also would make a lovely pretty backdrop for people travelling through and around Peacehaven. Planting areas on the roof of bus stops was also brought up as an option, this could be in any town and again the positive impact would be great.

Information and ideas were jotted and scribbled down onto the maps that will then be looked at further. We are looking forward to seeing how these maps will be used to develop some wild verges in the future.

Just sit for a minute and imagine what a summer would look like in your local area if all the underused green spaces had cornflower, corn poppy, corn marigold and corncockle.

This could be your local area – would you enjoy walking to the bus stop and seeing all the flowers in bloom, and butterflies flitting around? Would you like to take your kids to the park and have that sense of well-being simply by being surrounded by colours? Would you like to have something interesting to look at whilst waiting for a bus? There is no reason why this cannot be achieved, with community input and positive thinking.