November 28 2024

Alex Mayer, our new MP, visited Leighton Buzzard last week to meet members of the ‘United for Warm Homes’ campaign; South Beds Friends of the Earth are one of the organisations involved.

After that meeting, she wanted to see some of our wildlife-friendly sites First was the flowering hedge we helped to plant a couple of years ago, up by the boundary of The Wharf; then she came down to see Linslade Garden of Remembrance. Sorry, we don’t have any of the photos yet.

She commented on how neat the place was – I think that’s a first! But we do try to keep the path edges cut, and of course they’d been done extra carefully a couple of weeks ago, for Remembrance Day. And we scrape a trowel along the edge of the bed, which keeps weeds down, stops grass and plants invading from the paths, and makes a nice dark contrast of bare soil against the path edge – which makes the beds look particularly neat at this time of year, in low sunlight.

What goes on inside the beds is much less formal, though; Alex Mayer really liked all the tall plant stems we leave, with seed for birds (goldfinches were feeding when we went round to meet her) and places for insects to hide. She was interested in how we look after it, and in the support we have from the community, in many ways. And of course, she was impressed with the help we have from the preschool children, who were out this morning helping us gather leaves – more on that in our next post.