Category: Raised-beds

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News for February, 2024 – every little helps!

A stroll around the park has revealed interesting  new features for this year.

  1. A new rubbish bin in the Longfield meadows, next to the bench where you can admire the lakes. Every little helps – but hey Ealing parks, don’t stop there. Put a few more in!
  2. Two  large swathes in the north Londfield meadow appear to have been seeded. I will try to find out what the mix is (two years ago they put yellow rattle in, but it did not germinate).
  3. The bulbs in the raised beds in the orchard  are showing.  It’s quite a selection we put in last year, so do pop by when the flowers start in a few weeks time.
  4. I could not resist showing the mahonia next to the storage container in the orchard. It’s been there for years, having been planted when the area was a bowling green. It is starting to look very nice this year.

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Diversity in the Park orchard: A newsletter.

First, a bit of history. For many years, a bowling green was maintained in the park, just adjacent to the Cowgate road entrance. From personal memory, about 20 years ago there were regular Sunday bowls matches but one day some youngsters decided to play a game of football on the green. The cost of bringing the grass back up to playing quality was probably the final straw, since the bowling club left and went elsewhere for their matches. It lay fallow for years, until the dredging spoil from work on the nearby Coston’s brook was taken there around five years ago and some landscaping was done, as well as providing a small concrete seat in the middle.

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The orchard garden in July.

Even slightly “formal” gardens or planted beds in parks nowadays are not as common as they used to be; the cost of maintenance (= a lot of weeding) has reduced their number. More likely now are wild flower mixes along borders and meadows. Perivale park however does have one such planted area, in which four square meadows‡ mingle with borders surrounding seating and crab-apple trees adjacent to an orchard area that also has four community raised beds. A sort of informal allotment and garden rolled into one. Here are some photos of the flower meadows and raised beds as of mid-July. The maintenance by the way is done by a combination of Ealing Parks and volunteer weeders and waterers.

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