After cancelling two of our winter Maintenance and Conservation events because of rain, it was great to finally welcome in the early spring with an event to extend the flower diversity of our beautiful woods. Snowdrops are a welcome sign of the end of winter and a wonderful food source for early pollinators.
We are very lucky to have some well-established clumps of snowdrops on site, some in out-of-the-way places, but the big clumps can suffer from being too crowded and need to be split and re-planted while they are still “in the green” ( just after flowering ).
It was also decided to introduce the wonderful wood anemone to our undercroft and around the pond in the hope of more white flowers later in the spring.
An excellent team of students from Hope University joined the regular crew of volunteers to plant out over 100 corms of the wood anemone (looking a bit like brown strings in truth).
350 snowdrops rescued from the Childwall Lane area were planted alongside, to remind us where these “strings” were buried.
Luckily, we’ve had plenty of rain since to bed them in.
Thank you to all ten volunteers for a great job!