Volunteers have rolled up their sleeves to help bring blooms of colour to a biodiversity project.
Green-fingered Ruthin and Denbigh residents have stepped forward to help prepare for the new season of Denbighshire County Council’s Wildflower Meadows project.
Following the Council’s declaration of a climate and ecological emergency in 2019, this project is part of an ongoing commitment to enhancing biodiversity across the county,
Nearly 60 sites, including highway verges, footpath edges, cycleways and amenity grasslands, are now being managed to create wildflower meadows.
These sites, along with the 11 roadside nature reserves, equate to about 30 football pitches worth of grassland managed as native wildflower meadows.
As well as protecting wildflowers, the meadows are also boosting the welfare of native insects to Denbighshire.
Ruthin’s Friend of the Earth volunteer group helped plant up thousands of wildflower plants on a large road verge at Glasdir. Cutting on the road verge had previously been changed to encourage wildflowers but it was decided an extra boostof colour would benefit the site.
And over in Denbigh, local ward members, Councillors Mark Young and Rhys Thomas, along with members of the local Denbigh Rotary Club, and volunteers from the community, gathered together to plant wildflowers on areas of Lon Tywysog and Crud-Y-Castell green spaces within Denbigh to give them a seasonal boost.
Cllr Tony Thomas, the Council’s lead member for Housing and Communities said: “This project plays an important part in our commitment to biodiversity and supporting the preservation of native flowers and insect population across the county.
We are really grateful to the support given by all volunteers towards the project and we are looking forward to seeing these new additions bloom in Ruthin and Denbigh next year.”
All of the Council’s wildflower sites are managed in line with Plantlife’s Managing Grassland Road Verges guidelines which sees the grass cutting at these sites prohibited between March and August each year, giving wildflowers enough time to grow, flower, and set seed.
Each site is then cut after August and cuttings collected to reduce soil fertility and provide the wildflowers with the best conditions possible.
This project has also been funded by Welsh Government, through the Local Nature Partnerships Cymru ENRaW project.
