Lambeth Walk Bee Road Meadow 2024 Update
In early 2024, we announced the development of an area of Lambeth Walk Doorstep Green into a wildflower meadow as part of Lambeth’s Bee Roads, the council’s initiative to enhance street-side green spaces for both wildlife and people. Across the year, over 100 students, locals and corporate volunteers helped us create and maintain the meadow!
Wildflowers compete with grass for growing space, and so we first needed to reduce the amount of grass in the area, so it was mowed and scarified by a contractor. In areas the the machinery couldn't reach, a group of GLA volunteers dug up the grass to complete the preparation of the soil. At the end of March, our Study Programme students sowed a mix of native annual and biannual wildflower seed, and then danced on them - we call it a Seed Disco. The dancing pushes the seeds into the soil, helping them to germinate, mimicking what animals like deer do in the wild.
In April, corporate volunteers from Aviva planted over 150 native hedgerow whips kindly provided by the Woodland Trust. The hedge species were chosen for their benefits to wildlife, with species like Dog Rose, Blackthorn, Crab apple and Rowan providing flowers in spring and summer as food for pollinating insects, and fruit and berries in autumn and winter as food for birds.
The first year of meadow featured a range of blooming annual wildflowers, but the very wet and grey spring and early summer of 2024 was not ideal weather for its establishment - wildflowers love sunshine! The weather was beneficial for the hedge however, with almost all whips taking, despite the ground having shallow poor soil.
In autumn we began a second round of meadow establishment to ensure it's even more beautiful next year and beyond. Wildflowers thrive on poor soil, and so with corporate volunteers from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, we cut down the meadow and placed all the cuttings around the hedge saplings to compost down. We then scarified the ground again to remove further grass and create surface area for sowing more wildflowers. Importantly, we sowed a lot of yellow rattle, a hemi-parasite wildflower which acts like a vampire to grass, sucking out its nutrients, allowing other wildflowers to thrive. The world-renowned garden Great Dixter donated the strewings of their ancient meadows (full of rare native species), which were then added onto the meadow by corporate volunteers from Aesop, allowing the seed to disperse.
At the beginning of October, as part of our event Roots and Shoots Goes Wild!, volunteers from across London came via the nature skills charity Earthedto plant over 1000 native daffodil and crocus spring bulbs, again providing early nectar for pollinators, and beautiful colour for visitors to the green.
With all of this horticultural activity, we anticipate the meadow will be even more floriferous in 2025 and beyond, we're already looking forward to seeing it next summer!