Highbury Park Friends

Early this evening, Jean and I set up the first bit of paling for the wildflower garden. Rob has left us three short sections and some poles. Jean and I brought hand tools, and within an hour or so – and between rainshowers – had dug three holes, set the posts, and stapled the first bit of paling to them.

We made two small but fascinating discoveries in digging the post holes. The first post hole was very rich forest loam down to about 6 inches, then turned to a very sticky pale grey clay. The second posthole, 8 feet north, was the same composition, but the water table was about 12 inches below the surface, and rapidly filled the hole – as though we’d exposed yet another spring. We ended up packing that hole with bits of brick and stone found in the vicinity.

The third hole was loam for the first 6 inches, and then a pale grey sand mixed with white quartz pebbles. It too had water flowing through it, but which also just drained away through the sand rather than collecting in the hole.

So, three holes, three types of earth. And lots of water.

We may be back at it tomorrow evening, and would welcome another pair of hands. Leave word here or email us if you’re interested.

There’s still a major task or two in getting this thing set up. We haven’t made final decisions about which plants to put in, nor have we decided how much area to cover with each.  The plants will likely be set out in groups, but we don’t know yet what sort of pattern.

Maybe it will look something like this. Would you like to have a say?

So there’s some layout thinking to be done, as well as all the actual planting.

We’re starting to go through our tree survey data again, as some of it needs revising. The existing data is in a spreadsheet called

We want to revise correlations between ID numbers and tree tags, making note of which trees have died or otherwise changed, and tidying up any other information.

We’d also like to plot these on a map, but the data is currently in national grid reference format, so needs converting to decimal lat/lon to be useful in the various mapping applications.

If you have an interest in any of these tasks, please get in touch. Otherwise, feel free to have a look at the list of several hundred trees mapped by our fabulous crew of volunteer surveyors!