Plant wildflowers in your garden

Shared on from the Stroud Valleys Project.

I hope you like the picture.  These flowers are at the bottom of the Bisley Road Cemetery and were planted by Stroud Valleys Project working with Stroud Town Council. They were planted in late Spring and look at what a beautiful display we got. Now is the time to think about Autumn sowings.

To help you, Donald McIntyre from the native seed company, Emorsgate Seeds, has kindly agreed to come and give us an illustrated talk and PowerPoint presentation at the Lansdown Hall on Saturday 7^th September, doors open 10.30 for an 11am start. Tickets cost £6 in advance and £7 on the door.  We hope that everyone will walk up to the Festival of Nature afterwards (which is a free event) and sample the wonderful food that is on offer there.

 Donald McIntyre was born and grew up in this area so the Stroud Hills and Valleys are close to his heart.  He founded Emorsgate seeds to sell native wildflower seed to the landscape industry and to gardeners.  Emorsgate started off with 1 acre of land and they now have 130 acres.

In addition this is also about celebrating 25 years of Stroud Valleys Project and to do this we want to make, manage or monitor 25 wildflower sites across the District.  We want to start the conversation about how this will happen so we hope this event will be a great starting point for us to be more involved in this sort of work. Please, do forward this email or if you can put up some posters near you, please let us know and we will print some off for you.

The Talk is Aimed at: people who live in Stroud District who already have an interest in gardening and who want to find out how to encourage wild flowers in their garden.  Also, landscape gardeners, jobbing gardeners, local garden designers – I hope there will be something there for everyone

 Topics to be covered: Why wild flowers are important. Their decline over recent decades. Some background about Donald McIntyre and Emorsgate Seeds. How you can start by monitoring what you have in order to make the most of our floral heritage in this area.  How to note your wildflowers. How easy is it to grow wild flowers in Stroud? Is the soil suitable? What special measures might people need to put in place? If you’ve only got a small garden, what’s the best way to start? Which wild flowers flourish in Stroud? The St Catherine’s seed mixture. How to manage your wildflowers for a display year on year How can people get more information? Some seeds and books will be available for sale at the event

For further information, contact Julie Wickham.

Stroud Valleys Project
8 Threadneedle Street
Stroud
Gloucestershire
GL5 1AF
tel. 01453 753358
www.stroudvalleysproject.org