Pestival
by Dusty ~ September 5th, 2009. Filed under: Other Ramblings.
Popped up to Pestival for a couple of hours with my son. With all this twittering for tweehive day thought I should at least drag myself away from the computer and doing something a tad more interesting.
It was great – sitting at the tweehive cabaret wondering who was who. I am sure there were quite a few tweehive twitterers in the audience but the only one I recognised was Damien of HelpSavebees. I introduced myself briefly.
There were some excellent displays. I particularly liked the mobile brownfield site. This was a car and a trailer planted with plants form the Olympic site. I spent so many hours surveying the Olympic site for birds, particularly black redstarts over the years – it was good to see someone heralding the value of the brownfield land that has been lost to the epic event. Also good to know that there are at least a few green roofs and brown roofs being constructed as some form of mitigation. I did design one on the temporary railway accomodation, just outside the official Olmpic site in Leyton. This was demanded by the ODA.
Also was pleased to see a number of habitat walls. These are quite common in Germany and Switzerland. There are some great sand walls for bees in Berlin that I have seen but I think that is another blog story.
The London Wildlife Trust ‘pestival’ garden was great too, although it does annoy me that the Wildlife Trusts always herald simple sedum green roofs on sheds when we could and should be promoting much better and more nutrious planting schemes for bees and rare bugs. however the ground level stuff was really quite inspiring.
