Landscape Designers Call For Bolder Public Spaces

July 13, 2009 - PRLog -- £200 million of National Lottery funding has been made available for environmental projects across England to improve communities and lives.
School children from Prenton High School, in the Wirral, were recently charged with helping to pep up a park in Rock Ferry.  The planting day held at Victoria Park’s community garden, was made possible by a £450,000 Lottery fund Changing Spaces grant given to the local landlord and Peabody Trust.


Funding and the desire to create bold spaces will be addressed at Palmstead Nurseries forthcoming free to attend series of talks in September.

Horticultural academic Richard Bisgrove who will speak at  Palmstead Nurseries workshop in September says ‘Planting in public spaces is improving; there’s a big resurgence of interest in Victorian gardens, partly in response to lottery funding. There’s a general improvement in colour schemes in public spaces with harmonious planting but there’s a long way to go –Local Authorities have a very difficult task to fulfil but they could often be much bolder in their planting. If the quality of the landscape is there, then more people will appreciate it and this will be reflected socially - it could even prompt people to vote for their local council!’


Bisgrove,  Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Horticulture and Landscape at the University of Reading says; ‘ The idea of the Community Garden, as used well in cities such as New York, can bring people together in active involvement with their local gardens and parks.   This kind of interaction brings about a more humane type of landscape.  Nearly all the great gardens in England are made by amateurs.  Amateurs can create very exciting effects and we can learn from them; how plants are put together with carefully controlled irregularity and bold focal points.’


Brita von Schoenaich, a pioneering designer who made headlines when she used direct action to plant up the Hogarth roundabout in London as a meadow, has worked extensively on public spaces and  maintains that a huge budget isn’t integral to create an emotive public landscape;   ‘We have recently completed a scheme at Vauxhall Park using just lavenders.  It was a low budget scheme on a former bowling green and it’s been immensely popular with local residents – it’s somewhere small children can hide, like a maze.  It’s secure which is a big issue in parks – when you sit amongst it you have a degree of privacy but standing up you are seen – and it’s lovely when it flowers.  It was a cheap scheme.  We’re also doing quite a few schools and I do believe you can improve people’s environment in a more imaginative way than is done at the moment and in an affordable way.’


In terms of funding and the use of public money Bisgrove says; ‘I believe we have to persuade people, and politicians in particular, that landscape is an investment rather than cost.  There is so much evidence that people are healthier in a green environment.’