The Village Hub was successful in getting some Green Minds Funding for supporting community business type ideas in nature in Plymouth.
Being a community business in its truest form – ie we are a community in a community doing community work – has meant that we have been able to engage local people in taking more of an interest in the beautiful local park.
We got off to a great start by commissioning a local landscape artist to draw up some scale plans of the area and an idea to expand on a publicly used space in lockdown hidden in this group of cherry trees to create an outdoor learning table and seating.
Unfortunately the accessible path to the seating area which we wanted (who wants a cool area that can’t be accessed except by the adventurous and mountain goats of the community!) proved to be a Council red flag. Apparently paths without steps cost a small fortune to build, much more than our small grant.
So, back to the drawing board, we decided to use infrastructure money to plant instead of build. To date, we have over 3000 bulbs and 5 new large specimen trees in our rewilding area, with plans to use Pollenize (another local Green minds Community project) to provide shed loads of wild flower seed for us to sow in Spring.
We have also been moving on the permissions we paid the Council for to use the space for rewilding and the extended space in the park for events.
Working with support from Historic England who have jurisdiction over the remains of an 18th Century Redoubt in the park, we are planning some secret acoustic musical events to intrigue our community and celebrate the intimate relationship our park has with sunrises and sunsets, equinoxes and solstices.
Lockdown showed us how necessary our connection to the natural world is, and we are determined to open up the gift of this to all the residents of the local community by enticing them to come and have a look, dig a bit of earth and allow the space to do its magic!