Islington Wildlife

Islington in bloom 2012

Green-fingered residents in Islington are being invited to get ready for this year's Islington in Bloom competition.

Categories range from best children's planting to best container planting, with garden vouchers up for grabs for the winners.  The Camden Garden Centre is also giving a free bag of compost, a half price plant and a £5 gift voucher to every entrant.

Prizes are sponsored by local businesses and organisations, and the deadline for applications is Friday 15 June.

Islington in Bloom is judged by the council's Greenspace staff and Islington Gardeners volunteers. The entries will be judged on: visual impact, selection and use of plants, design and quality of features, maintenance and condition, sustainability, wildlife friendliness and community involvement (in appropriate categories).

Judging will take place in early July, at the same time as the borough is being judged for London in Bloom.

To find out more or to fill in an application form visit our www.islington.gov.uk/inbloom or call Morgan Pegg on 020 7527 1782.

Application forms can also be picked up at park keepers’ huts in Islington's parks, the Islington Ecology Centre in Gillespie Road and in the borough's libraries and leisure centres.

The full list of categories, with sponsors' names in brackets, is as follows:

Best Container Garden (Camden Garden Centre)

Best Front Garden (Islington Gazette)

Best entry from an individual Housing Services resident - (Islington's Housing Services)

Best Self-contained Community Garden (Eurovia)

Best Residential Communal Garden (Mick Duffy, Horticulturalist)

Best tree pit - (City Suburban)

Best allotment or food growing plot - (Enterpirse plc)

Best children's planting - (After Noah)

Best blooming pub or business - (Irvin Leisure and Islington Gazette)

Best forgotten corner - (Partners for Improvement)

Nancy Pattenden Award - (Islington Gardeners)

Islington Tree Wardens Easter Event

When: 14 April 2012

Time: 10:30am to 1:30pm

Where: New River Walk, Canonbury

Building on the great success of the Islington Tree Warden launch event on the Westbourne Estate, we are now planning our exciting Easter activities.

There'll be something for everyone with lots of arts and crafts for children to get involved in plus an hour long tree walk for those interested along the beautiful canal. The tree walk will be lead by one of the knowledgable Tree Officers from Islington's Tree Service so promises to be both fun and informative.

These walks always prove very popular so please let us know if you intend to come along and then we can plan how many cuppa's to have ready!

For more information and to rsvp please email Freya.Grummitt@islington.gov.uk

Grow for gold

To commemorate the Olympic year, Capital Growth has launched “Grow for Gold” to encourage and support community groups who want to start a food growing space in 2012. Support includes training, events, monthly competitions and much more and is designed to help people start their food growing space in time for the Olympics and Paralympic Games, when the Grow for Gold competition will be judged. The final winners will win additional prizes from Capital Growth sponsors.

To celebrate the launch of Grow for Gold, we are giving away five cash prizes, each representing the popular Olympic running events (£1500, £800, £400, £200 £100), to community groups and schools who want to start a community food-growing space this year, plus the chance to win training and vouchers to help you get growing ! To find out more visit Capital Growth.

Cast your vote now and help Freightliners Farm

Freightliners Farm have been shortlisted to recieve a green grant for £10,000 for a bee club.

To find out more and vote please visit green giving.

New Homes For London's Wildlife

Central London businesses are sponsoring a new competition to design new homes for wildlife that live in the heart of the city. Inmidtown, the business development group that represents such areas as the British Museum and the Centrepoint skyscraper, are calling for new designs for beehives designed for urban beekeeping, bat and bird boxes, and planters.

The competition is to be run by the Architecture Foundation, a charity that promotes contemporary design, and is intended to complement Midtown Buzz, a scheme that offers free beekeeping advice and equipment, and increase the diversity of wild animals living on, around, and between the buildings of Holborn and St. Giles. The winners of the competition will see their designs built and used in the area.

An update from Wild Places

It has been a busy and very successful summer for the Wild Places project. We’ve visited some beautiful green spaces around London including Rainham Marsh, Epping Forest and the Lea Valley where we’ve enjoyed pond dipping, gone searching for dragonflies, identified black fallow deer in a deer sanctuary, looked for mini-beasts, explored an ancient woodland, met some English longhorn cows and even climbed trees under the expert tuition of the Epping Forest arborists!

The Wild Places team has also been out and about attending various community events such as the Big Day Out in Whittington Park, the Mayton Street Party and the Tollington Ward Partnership meeting. Visitors to these events have been able to try a number of different activities such as building butterfly feeders, creating seed bombs, our very popular slimy insect lucky dip and making bat masks and puppets.

 Each of the four participating community centres has also been busy delivering Wild Places activity. The Holloway Neighbourhood Group now has a regular afternoon gardening group tending the forest garden there; Caxton House Community Centre has introduced a free Wild Places After School Club; Whittington Park Community Association has led a butterfly and a bat walk (in partnership with the London Wildlife Trust). Hilldrop Community Centre has been the busiest with all the centre users joining in to help dig a new pond.

Although the weather is starting to turn more autumnal we will still be delivering a number of activities over the next couple of months. There will be a half term trip to the London Wildfowl and Wetland Centre in Barnes and our first Seasonal Celebration Event at Hilldrop Community Centre. This will be a twilight launch of the new pond there and will feature a variety of pond and harvest themed arts and crafts as well as entertainment.

We are always looking for more people to get involved in the project so if you would like to know more or would like to volunteer please see:

www.octopuscommunities.org.uk

Facebook – Octopus Community Network or The Wild Places Project

Twitter – OCN Islington

Or contact the Wild Places team on wildplaces_events@hotmail.co.uk or 0207 263 7095

Heather, Wild Places

25th Gillespie Festival a sunny success!

Festival organisers were relieved to see the rain dry up and sun appear for the annual Gillespie Festival on Sunday. Around 2,000 people turned out to enjoy the entertainment in the nature reserve which included live music, morris dancing, circus skills, and story-telling.

This annual community event is organised by the Friends of Gillespie Park with support from the council’s Nature Conservation Team who are based at the Ecology Centre in the park. It is a great opportunity to party in the park – however, remember we are here all year round, so why not come for a visit? Gillespie Park is open from 8am to dusk every day except for Arsenal match days. The Ecology Centre is open from 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday.

Thanks to all those that helped out and attended

Sally

 

Free packs of trees available

100 FREE packs of trees are available to give to community and school groups in London this coming autumn.  

Provided by the Woodland Trust and RE:LEAF, these packs contain either 105 or 420 native saplings and come in a mix of three different themes:

Wildlife: blackthorn, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, rowan, common oak
Year-round colour: hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, rowan, wild cherry, dogwood
Wild harvest: hazel, blackthorn, crab apple, elder, dog rose

The larger 420 pack also comes with protective canes and spirals. Trees supplied are between 20 - 40cm in height and are ideal for planting as hedges, copses or small blocks of trees.

It's really easy to apply - just visit: www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/londonfreetrees before Sunday 25th September.

Gillespie Park Festival, 11 September 2011

2011 sees the 25th Anniversary of the Gillespie Park Festival, and this year it promises to be bigger and better than ever before! Gillespie Park, a beautiful nature reserve in the heart of Islington will play host to an afternoon of music, dancing, kids activities and stalls selling a range of produce. Come along and shake your stuff with the Morris dancing troupe The Morris Men, or listen to the incredible sounds of Hani Solomon, an Ethiopian singer whose vocals are second to none.

For those who prefer a slightly more relaxing vibe there's our acoustic cafe, serving up organic food to enjoy whilst listening to acts including Mello Cello. In the main field there will be stalls selling a range of goods, from home made jams and pickles to fabulous arts and crafts, with the wide array of good available there will be something for everyone! There's also a huge range of activities for children, including storytelling with the wonderful George Fiawoo.

The Festival runs from 1pm - 5pm on Sunday 11 September 2011.

Justin Bere's green roofs

With four green roofs, Justin Bere’s self-built, energy efficient, solar family home just off Newington Green is an oasis of native planting. The roofs contain a variety of habitats including a hawthorn thicket, a hazel woodland and a wild flower meadow. These provide space for a valuable urban ecosystem  of native trees and wild flowers, and create habitats for insects, bees and other wildlife. Sparrow, wren, tit and bat boxes have also been installed within the walls to encourage local native bird populations to breed and 10,000 bees in his hive help with pollination of local flowers. Justin is one of the UK’s foremost ecological and environmental architects and his practice, bere:architects, specialises in Passivhaus which is a way of constructing buildings with highly insulated walls, triple glazed windows and a heat recovery ventilation unit, which combine to minimise heat loss and results in buildings that are cool in summer and require very little energy to keep comfortably warm in winter. Combine these buildings with green roofs and the results show that in the UK we can build well rounded, ecological houses which cost very little to heat, are comfortable to live in and that we can all be truly proud of for generations to come.

Justin picks up the story of his thriving green roof so far this year…This Spring has seen the built-in bird boxes in my house get used for the first time. First one family of coal tits nested a few metres from 12 people in a busy office, fully opened up with folding-sliding doors. Then, to everyone's astonishment, another family nested only 1 metre from the open doors of the office and no more than 3 metres from the nearest seated person. 

Three or four blackbird chicks were also produced this spring and the whole family are regularly out feeding for worms in the hazel coppice on my green roofs. It's the perfect habitat for them, with only a dense covering of damp brown leaves. These are easily scratched away to find worms. Individual trees don't give enough shade for this kind of habitat. They need woods. Yet we often seem to regard woods in urban areas as worrying and we thin them out so grass can grow underneath. But we should value dense woodland!

We are also regularly visited by everyone's favourite - the goldfinches – and they play and sing in the hawthorn coppice all day long.

My bees are doing fine. They are very friendly and I can get right up close to the entrance of the hive. These bees are treated very gently by me and my beekeeping manager, Ian Bailey of Hackney City Farm. I think that they understand we are here to help them. We don't need any protective gear when opening up the hive. Even the BBC camera man and producer who visited last week were confident enough to film without protective gear and let the bees land on them and have a chat! 

Eleanor Spratt is the latest in a line of university Masters and PhD research students referred to me by Dusty Gedge, the international green roof expert, investigating the benefits of green roofs as a solution to a loss of wildlife habitat. She is doing a comparative study between green roofs, urban green space and brownfield sites. An outline of her study is available as a pdf on bere:architects' Research page http://bere.co.uk/research. 

 By early summer 2011, Eleanor reported finding the following on my wildflower meadow, although others including grasshoppers have been found since: 

Apionidae (beetle)

Clubionia reclusa (spider)

Cicurina cicur (spider)

Chysomelidae (beetle)

Coccinellidae (beetle)

Erigone promiscua (spider)

Erigone dentipalpis (spider)

Harpalus affi nis (beetle)

Lepthyphantes mengei (spider)

Lepthyphantes tenuis (spider)

Oedothorax retusus (spider)

Oedemeridae (beetle)

Pachygnatha degeeri (spider)

Staphylinidae (beetle)

Since May 2011, Huma Pearce (http://www.mostlybats.org/) has been carrying out research on bats flying over my green roofs at the Muse. The Muse is one of many green roofs being surveyed throughout greater London, and several are found in the London Borough of Islington. The aim of the project is to understand whether green roofs provide habitat for bats within urban areas and determine whether they can offer a compensatory measure for habitat losses associated with development as well as a conservation measure for these species in otherwise low quality urban environments. An initial outline of this research can also be found at http://bere.co.uk/research. So far we have recorded 4 species of bat commuting over the roof, with a few individuals having an opportunistic feed as they travel between their roost sites and primary foraging grounds. Maybe one day they will choose to live here too!

Lucy Procter, Bere Architects