Workparty

From white elephants to daffodils.

Some of the £145 we raised on our White Elephant Stall at Southwick Flower Show on August Bank Holiday Monday has been spent on 250 native daffodil bulbs.

Sarah and Alan ordered the bulbs, making sure that they hadn’t been stolen from the wild or imported from continental Europe, but had been bred and harvested in the UK. The bulbs, firm and healthy, arrived last week and this week’s Wednesday workparty planted them under the apple trees in the Heritage Orchard.

Phil cut back the foliage around the base of the trees, Alan and Clive dug the holes and then everybody turned to the back-breaking work of planting. The bulbs were set out in groups so that they will come up in clumps that we hope will, very quickly, look well established, as if they had always been there.

We have been rewilding the reserve for years, way before anybody even invented the word, never mind turned it into a headline. Mostly the things we do are invisible: stocking the hedges with native shrubs to provide nesting sites and autumn fruit for birds, creating hibernacula in sheltered corners for our grass snakes and slow worms, weeding out invasive species in the copses and along the stream banks, and encouraging deadwood habitat. But just occasionally we like to hurry our native flora along and plant pretty things, things that make us stop and look.

We are hoping that come the spring all those white elephants will have metamorphosed into golden daffodils.