Glorious weather adds to another successful community event
Glorious sunshine helped make this year's Buriton Open Gardens Renaturing Trail a great success, with scores of visitors enjoying the seven venues around the village.
The Trail combined a variety of private gardens with public open spaces, providing plenty of inspiration about how everyone can play a part in supporting nature.
The gardens showed how native hedges, rather than fences, can provide food and shelter for a range of creatures, particularly birds and important pollinators.
And parts of each lawn left unmown from spring through to autumn had become havens for wildflowers, colourful grasses, orchids, primroses and knapweeds.
Even the regularly mown parts of each lawn were being cut at a slightly higher level, allowing clover to flourish and providing a valuable source of nectar for bees.
Small ponds were teeming with frogs, newts, pond skaters and water boatmen, while dragonflies and damselflies were frequent visitors.
Garden owners explained how sharing their gardens with wildlife had brought an extra sense of enjoyment, delight and discovery throughout the seasons.
Visitors also saw how the Recreation Ground's wild borders are now buzzing with butterflies, bees and moths amongst swathes of yellow rattle, selfheal, oxeye daisies, knapweed, buttercups and clover.
The Trail also highlighted the work taking place over the last year to enhance biodiversity at the village pond, with hopes that improvements can also be made on the District Council’s nearby pond green area, too. Together with parts of the churchyard, these areas provide important wildlife corridors, helping pollinators and other species do their work to help produce food for us all to eat.
Inside the church, display boards described some of the excellent work being carried out by Buriton's farmers to support nature, including creating new ponds, restoring chalk downland, planting wildlife-friendly hedgerows, improving the breeding success of important birds and providing support for endangered species.
Visitors could also learn practical ways to help hedgehogs and garden birds at home.
It’s hoped that the event will inspire more people to join the village’s campaign to support nature. More information can be obtained by emailing buritonbea@gmail.com as well as by visiting the ‘Helping Nature’ parts of the community website: Helping nature help us | Buriton Community Website
Overall, it was another enjoyable and inspiring event, showing how even small changes in gardens and green spaces can make a real difference for wildlife.
