Garden efforts pay off

Two years of effort has paid off for villagers who have completed the first stage of transforming a piece of land into a wildlife garden.

Upton Parish Council was given the 1/3-acre on Main Street, known as the Collies, about four

years ago.

After consulting with villagers the council decided to create a wildlife garden and seating area.

Work on the structure of the garden, including building paths, installing a notice board and benches, flattening the ground and laying hedges was recently completed thanks to a £4,000 grant from Nottinghamshire County Council’s Building Better Communities scheme.

The garden also has features to encourage wildlife including bird nesting boxes and a hedgehog house.

The parish council clerk, Mr David Slight, said the next stage of work would be to plant more wild flowers as the garden matured.

He said: “The garden isn’t really looking its best at the moment because the hedging we have planted has got to grow and it takes time for a garden to mature, but hopefully it will just look better and better as time goes on.

“Before it was a bit of a waste land, now we hope it will be used by parents with toddlers to go in and a sit down and chat.

“Hopefully it will also be used for outdoor events, for instance the Christmas carols, which used to be held on the green by the road.

“When we held the carols last year we had to put barriers up to make sure children didn’t walk into the busy road.

“We also hope the villagers will use it for sitting out and admiring birds and wild flowers because there is nowhere to really do that in Upton.”

The parish council chairman, Mr Derek Hall, said the garden would not be completely finished until spring.

“Hopefully it is now going to be a more pleasant area to see or be in,” he said.

The triangular piece of land was originally used as a highways dump by Nottinghamshire County Council.

It was given to a charity group called the Collies Trust in the 1950s but they did not have public liability insurance for the land so it was given to the parish council.